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Technology: Are Cloud and Mobile Pulling us Forward or Holding us Back?
Forrester recently took out their crystal ball to attempt some predictions for what the world of technology will look like three years from now. Not surprisingly, they see today’s top hot technologies of cloud, mobile, social and data as laying the groundwork for the next generation of technologies.
Forrester’s Brian Hopkins summarized 15 technology trends that they see for the next three years:
Social and Collaborative technologies
- Advanced collaboration and communication
- Systems of engagement. Very custom UIs based on user profile, location and situation.
Sensors, Devices and M2M technologies
- Smart products that can sense, react, and communicate.
- Next-generation devices and UIs. The tablet will emerge as the principle computing device for most people.
- In-location positioning. GPS and in-building location sensors
- Machine-to-machine networks. Expected to further give rise to the Internet of Things.
Process data management technologies
- Smart process applications and semantics.
- Advanced analytics. Better dashboards, what-if’s, visualizations and drill-downs.
- Pervasive BI. On-demand business intelligence — pull not push.
- Process and data cloud services. Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability.
Infrastructure and application platforms
- Big data platforms.
- Breakthroughs in storage and computing hardware. Think smaller, cheaper and faster. Moore’s law still is with us.
- Software-defined infrastructure. Data center networking that runs on software.
- Cloud application frameworks.
- New identity and trust models.
Hopkins wrote for Forrester that “Emerging digital technologies are a primary driver of business evolution and disruption. Firms are grappling with an accelerating pace of business change while also trying to make IT simpler and more cost effective. Amid these forces, savvy enterprise architects, IT strategists, and business technology leaders are constantly peering into the future to recognise the next big technology thing in time to make good investment decisions.”
But not everyone sees these trends from a rosy perspective. John Dvorak on PCMag laments that these technology trends are regressive rather than powering us forward. He says that the trend towards central cloud computing with tethered mobile consumers harkens back to the days of mainframe computing.
Dvorak writes that “Curiously, before these trends began to emerge, everything was moving toward individual empowerment, with desktop computing being in the middle of the revolution. By moving away from this primary trend (mobiles hangs on to the remnants), the entire industry has suffered, and for good reason. These ‘new’ trends are counter-revolutionary and hark back to the pre-1980s mainframe and distributed processing eras. Thus, any real progress has been stopped dead in its tracks and once-promising developers now work on variations of the flashlight app… It’s too bad, but there is only one major trend here: stagnation.”
