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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).
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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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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.