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Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies For Next 4 Years
Dr. Jim writes "The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years. The usual suspects including multi-core chips, virtualization, and cloud computing are on the list. Multicore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes, and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes."
Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away.
But borne from the ashes of the 'centralized IT department' come the 'social networking support department'. Because no matter how intuitive you make it, someone won't get it. That fact, combined with the problem that the larger your corporation becomes, the more obfuscated every little thing is (I work for GE).
Informatus Technologicus
Quote mining for the win! "In the C-blox world, a truck drops off a data center container and then picks it up again in a few years when Microsoft is ready to switch over to new hardware. Administrators will only enter the physical C-blox in the rarest of occasions. "In that sense, your IT workers look more like truckers and longshoremen than traditional IT workers," Manos said. It will also allow Microsoft to run the entire Northlake facility with a continuous staff of little more than 20 or 30 employees."
Well I'm not sure about how they have used hybrid cores, but try multicores with one core being an - on the fly reconfigurable FPGA' these kind of things would be so totally awesome if used properly. I think IBM is moving along similar lines for it's CELL series, there may be a tie-up with Xilinx involved - that I'm not so sure of, but it can be used most interestingly.
And is not all that obvious to most of the people who are just keeping up with computers rather than computing.
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Not only that, and you do make a hugely valid point, but all this IT infrastructure is ... well, it would grind office productivity to a halt if the printer is broken. Despite all the hardware, the paperless office has not yet taken off in any meaningful way. When the connection between your desktop and the printer is through a router that is on the other side of the country, and it takes 2 hours to get it working, productivity will drop significantly. To simply bleat on about moving the data center out into the cloud is blindly spewing PR like the run up to the invasion of Iraq.
Much like outsourcing has come to be more expensive, so too will 'outsourcing' your data center. I'm sure that we've all heard of DDoS attacks. How convenient will they become when your data is on the other side of a router from your workers? Yeah, the SLAs sound good on paper, but oat 4:30 on a Friday of a long weekend, when your billing processes grind to a halt, how long will it take to get fixed? My personal favorite is the data center people telling me it is an application error. The billing department is telling me that their application is giving an error that a server can't be found. My code says that there is a permission problem on a network directory, and no one left in the data center has admin rights on that box.
Yep, this outsourcing thing will work out well.
What was that old saying? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself? Sometimes it is true, ya know?
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I'm the I.T. guy for a company that has 20 staff in the office, and 200 employees, and also owns 3 other smallish companies. Good luck with virtualizing...we run tons of proprietary apps that the devs cant even figure out how to turn them into a service, let alone make them portable to use from a datacenter in god-knows-where-istan (or california, whichever has more crazies :P )
Then, there's our connection, which, lets face it, is business cable, and goes down on occasion...so we need an in-house server at all times.
But the real problem is the PEBKAC problems that i run through every day, and those require in-house I.T...Every-Ten-Minutes...
Downsize the I.T. dept? Good-Fracking-Luck. :P
But half the companies out there aren't actually doing anything complicated.
...hmmm....)
I've been looking at open source ERP solutions (ERP5, Adempiere, etc.) and it makes me wonder whether you could set up a company that configures and manages servers and ERP systems. The actual boxes could be at your place or elsewhere.
Basically, you can offer companies a complete package for HR, order management, invoicing, payroll, etc. without them having to hire a single extra person. You'd have to have a clause in the contract to give them all their data and server configuration on demand, of course, maybe even send them weekly backups as part of your disaster recovery plan.
In the end you'd end up with a company of highly specialized people, giving your customers good response and high end features (mobile access? no problem), for less than it would cost them to have a team knowledgeable enough and able to do 24 hour support.
Of course companies would still need help desk and business-specific software, but that's less people (and is sometimes outsourced/contracted out anyway). You web presence would probably be custom made though.
And if you're an internet company, just forget it. (or then again, you hire a designer to provide custom CSS for the provider's web interface to the standard modules to the open source ERP system, which might be enough for half the sites out there too
It is true that virtualization technology allows businesses to do more IT functions with less IT staff. But it is also true that businesses are doing increasingly more IT functions all the time. So long as these factor balance each other out, IT will maintain its relatively low unemployment rate and its relatively high payscale.
However, if this balance tips, companies will benefit while IT staff loses. I consider this a possible future scenario, so I live well within my means and use a large percentage of my salary to buy ownership positions in those very companies that stand to profit from my obsolesce. That way, even if I lose in one way I win in another.
The stock market really is an amazing force for blurring the line between the working class and the ownership class, and I take full advantage of this power.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If you have a shop that has a very large compute farm that runs exclusively, batch jobs, then you can clearly understand where cloud computing can be a tremendous advantage. A lot of users of batch compute resources find creative ways to serialize and/or parallelize their overall process using scripts, multiple hosts, dependencies, etc. With cloud computing, all of this can be implemented automatically.
That's a huge time and cost saver right there alone. Additionally, with our cloud computing solution (Electric Cloud), we get an additional advantage with the built in virtualization that comes along with the system. In the old days, we were forced to manage multiple development build stacks to satisfy the needs of multiple business units or departments. Now, we manage a cloud of hosts that are baseline installs, with bare minimal configurations, and the submit host's environment is replicated to the cloud nodes when a build is kicked off. This saves money on hardware resources, hardware resources, engineering resources, etc.
You may think, well, most developers use the same build stack or tool stack - but that's an assumption that has been proven incorrect time and time again where I work. We work with embedded device developers and they have a very specific tool stack requirement, with specific versions, or may need a pristine build environment without the possibility of conflicts from various packages that may be installed on the build host.
Don't Panic.
The best part is that the Gartner reports I've seen ususally cost about $400 and probably average 8-10 pages. Not worth it in my opinion but then again for corporations who believe Gartner reports are prophecy I guesz $400 for a multi-billion dollar company isn't a big deal.
Right, in a large corporation, when a new tool or application is brought in, it usually has to go through an architectural review, a readiness review, and various other reviews. One thing corporations like to know is whether or not the company that they are about to dump $10k per seat (much, much more in a lot of cases, I'm just throwing that number out there) license on is going to be around in 5 years when the corporation is neck deep in the implementation of that product. This is where the Gartner group comes in. It gives the company a starting point in the decision process on whether they are about to make a good investment and start a relationship with a proven entity.Also, a lot of corporations are not trend setters or trailblazers - they are followers. The execs all get together to see what the other companies are doing, what trends are popular and successful, and usually decisions are based on that. The Gartner group is perfect for this mindset.
There are some large corporations out there that are IT risk takers and trendsetters, but I haven't been fortunate enough to work for many.
Don't Panic.