ChannelWorld

Way back in 1900, when The Ladies Home Journal published a list of ‘What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years’, its author himself thought that those prophecies seemed ‘strange and almost impossible’. A century later, if we take a look back, we can see that some of those predictions were unbelievably precise! While nobody would now take the risk of predicting the next 100 years (especially in IT, considering its dynamic nature), this is the perfect time of the year for us to anticipate all good things.

2009 has been an exceptionally bad year for the Indian economy and IT industry in particular. Bad, but eventful. We saw mass lay-offs by companies that were once the largest hirers. We saw companies shutting down their offices. We saw companies being acquired. Still, a majority did strive through the bad times, with innovations, right strategies, and persistence. Fortunately, signs of an early revival are so strong that it cannot go unnoticed. Hopefully, the IT industry is expected to have better times ahead in 2010.

And as 2010 kicks-off on an optimistic note, the time is perfect to look at some of the top technologies and trends that will shape the industry’s future. As every analyst firm and research agency goes about predicting its own list of Top 10 technologies to watch out for, we distill the Top 10 from the sea of predictions.
We, however, are not trying to predict the future, but are just making an effort to convey what the top analysts and industry gurus believe. We hope this list of Top 10, not in any order of importance, would help you understand the direction the industry is predicted to take in 2010.

Business Process Management  

There are plenty of indicators that Business Process Management (BPM) will be big in 2010. Gartner predicts that the BPM market will grow from $1 billion to $2.6 billion by 2011, a CAGR of 23.8 percent. And PricewaterhouseCoopers thinks that demand for BPM tools will exceed that of BI tools!

Interestingly, 30 percent of CIOs say they are already implementing BPM and another 60 percent are either upgrading their current BPM projects or looking to start one in 2010, according to the State of the CIO: 2009 survey. Now, that’s something most channel partners would love to hear!

The reason why BPM will matter in 2010 is simple. Organizations now need to make workflow changes on the fly and cash in on the recovery – or lose consumers and trading partners alike. Their ability to ensure that they charge on the up-slope makes it imperative to leverage the power of automation.

As Kumar Parakala, KPMG’s Executive Director and Head IT Advisory, rightly says, “CIOs must understand the direction of the business they are supporting and enabling. They need to very carefully analyze how IT can support either a growth or a cost-optimization agenda. During the next few months, the single most important objective for an organization should be to develop strategies that will enable recovery from the recent economic slowdown and help launch their organization on a growth path.” While strategies can definitely take an organization on a growth path, it’s imperative to have tools like BPM to streamline the whole process.

BPM could be one of the most significant weapons for enterprises to meet changing business needs over the next few months. It can help derive more value from business transformation initiatives. As a result, BPM edges over other technologies to get into this list of Top 10 for 2010 because it can help enterprises with their compliance challenges.

Bottom line: BPM will play a greater role in 2010 as enterprises zero in on market enhancement and customer satisfaction. Over the next year, expect to see process automation free up more manual operations and resources, which in turn will contribute to more strategic objectives.

Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing

Business Intelligence

How many times have we all heard of the advantages of Business Intelligence, especially in 2009? Surely that number is pretty huge. But all we want to tell you is that you’re probably going to hear more about it 2010. In 2008-09, as IT markets everywhere were being pummeled, the market for business intelligence tools in Asia Pacific grew by 7.7 percent, according to IDC. The good news for channel is that Indian CIOs opted for business intelligence as their highest technology priority for 2010 (out of distinct 14 choices), in the of the State of the CIO: 2009 survey. The need for consolidating various reporting systems in an organization is viewed as the major reason for the growth of BI.

“Following the economic crisis, many decision makers and information workers felt the pain of insufficient, inaccurate or contradictory information as they tried hard to grow their business,” says Sharon Tan, Research Manager of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Software Research. “IDC expects this need to fuel interest in BI solutions and pave the way for future BI growth. In fact, despite tough times, a significant percentage of organizations surveyed are already planning to equip users, such as managers and customer-facing employees, with timely information over the next 18 months by having BI more pervasively available in their organization,” Tan says.

Adds Kapil Dev Singh, Country Manager, IDC India, “The lessons from the slump have been learnt well and now the focus is going to be on how to put IT to use and what kind of competitive advantage the business can draw from it.” And this precisely means that companies would invest more in tools that can help them take the right decisions.

However, the growth path for this technology is not going to be as smooth as expected. According to a recent survey by Kognitio (which provides business intelligence solutions), over 75 percent of BI projects take over a year to produce results. And almost two-thirds of companies who have such a system get regular complaints from users. But there are many ways out, like combining an ERP system with BI. So, these small hindrances are not likely to curb the growth of BI.

Simply put, business intelligence is definitely a space to look forward to in 2010. The slowdown might have caused enterprises to shrink their IT budgets, but it isn’t stopping them from investing in their favorite application.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is poised to win the title of the most popular buzzword of 2010. It has already found place in most of the ‘Top 10 predictions for 2010’, including those from leading research agencies like Gartner and IDC. It’s no surprise considering the fact that recession has led enterprises to look into cloud computing to reduce the amount of expensive hardware in their datacenters and also to slash costs associated with new IT projects.

However, the actual number of organizations that have deployed cloud computing remains small – only about 6 percent of Indian CIOs say they currently use cloud services, according to The State of the CIO: 2009. But that’s about to change. The same survey shows that 37 percent of Indian CIOs are actively researching the delivery model (with an intent to use in 2010) and another 50 percent say it is on their radar. “Despite all the security threats, cloud computing is a risk worth taking. We need to take the plunge instead of sitting around and waiting for things to happen,” says Atul Jayawant, President Corporate IT & Group CIO, Aditya Birla Group.

Cloud computing is a broad term and certain applications on the cloud would witness more growth. According to Gartner, private clouds will get acceptance in the coming year. The research agency says that the three important areas of corporate use of the cloud are consumption of cloud services, developing cloud-based applications, and implementing private cloud computing environments. Gartner senior analyst and mobile guru, Nick Jones says, “Not everything is appropriate in a public cloud at this point in time. Regulatory and maturity issues may mean you don’t want to put things on public clouds, but you may want to experiment with cloud computing, so private clouds may be the answer.”

There is clearly a drift towards innovative IT applications. Sivarama Krishnan, Executive Director and Partner, Performance Improvement, PwC, says “Organizations will change the way they invest in IT in 2010.”
This sends a clear message to the channel partners in the country – those who are not ready to focus away from selling complex legacy applications will be counted out in the cloud computing space. At the same time, ‘Cloud’ would bring tremendous amount of opportunities to channels that are ready to innovate.

Data De-duplication, Desktop Virtualization

Data De-duplication

Data de-duplication was definitely one of the most talked about technologies in 2009 and it’s likely to have the same status in 2010 too. According to a recent Gartner report, enterprise data is likely to increase by 650 percent by 2014. The same report predicts that data de-duplication will be one of the Top 10 IT management trends among CIOs. And the reason is clear.

“The vast amount of unstructured data is costing enterprises dearly and this cost can be reduced by using technologies such as data de-duplication,” says David Cappuccio, Chief of Research for the Infrastructure teams at Gartner. And even the end-users are in agreement. “Data explosion is definitely a big concern today, so more people may start using data de-duplication technology,” says Sudhir K Reddy, CIO, MindTree.

According to Gartner, many IT shops are seeing storage reductions of 50 percent to 60 percent with dedupe, which eliminates duplicate copies of stored objects and files.

However, the market for data de-duplication had not really taken off in 2009 as the technology remained unaffordable. But, that scenario is predicted to change in 2010. Market research firm The InfoPro reveals that, by the end of 2010, about 70 percent of the infrastructure in the Fortune 1000 companies will be protected by replication solutions such as de-duplication. Channel partners should definitely keep an eye on this emerging technology.

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization is something that the industry should keep tabs on. The reasons are plenty. Fact 1: applications are getting increasingly network and server-based. Fact 2: more users are moving to non-PC devices including smartphones and netbooks. Fact 3: more employees are demanding flexible work times and environments, like working from home.

These drivers have — and will — increasingly boost the diversity in hardware, operating systems, and applications that organizations have to deal with. At the same time, they still need to manage their IT infrastructures and their costs. There’s one way to synthesize the two opposing forces of user flexibility and IT control and that’s desktop virtualization. Besides, desktop virtualization will help both enterprises and their channel partners to dispose of issues related to remote support, security, and administration issues tied to PCs.

A study conducted by analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates in August showed how important the quality of the user experience was as a criterion enterprises used to evaluate virtual desktop infrastructures. Asked to rate the most important factor in choosing a desktop virtualization system, out of 10 options, 75 percent of companies chose “ease of use for end-users.”

But even if enterprises can swing computing environments that are not user-friendly, virtual desktops can still help them cut support costs and increase security.

Of course, there are challenges. Like any other new technology, enterprises are reluctant to be the first one in the desktop virtualization pool. The high capital expense desktop virtualization requires and the fact that it’ll require new servers in already densely packed datacenters are some of the reasons behind the technology’s slow start.
That said a senior analyst with the Burton group, Chris Wolf, expects desktop virtualization to pick up speed in 2010. He suspects penetration levels might go up to between 20 and 25 percent.

And here’s what Gartner said when they agreed that desktop virtualization was a technology to bet on in 2010: “Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap.”

So in 2010, look out for more people getting on to the desktop virtualization boat, slowly at first and faster and faster as time progresses.

Green IT & Energy Efficiency, Mobile Applications, Server Virtualization

Green IT & Energy Efficiency

The entry of Green IT into the Top 10 list may seem to be a bolt from the blue. But let’s admit it, even as the term turns into a moldy cliché, there are still precious few enterprises that have real green IT programs. For instance, less than 10 percent of 1,200 firms that were surveyed across Asia Pacific have a formal green IT strategy in place, says Springboard Research. As a result, many in the industry still believe that Green IT will make a ‘big noise’ in 2010.

From the first recorded green computing movement — the Energy Star Program in 1992 — to the Copenhagen climate change conference, the Green movement and its effects on IT have come long way.
Nick Jones, the senior analyst at Gartner, who unveiled the research firm’s top-10 strategic technologies for 2010, points that green IT figured at number four. “Some of the emphasis on green IT has shifted, it’s now not just about making the organization’s IT function more green, it’s about using IT to support the overall corporate green goals,” Jones says.

Even if you don’t take Gartner’s word for it, it’s a fact that the economic slowdown gave green IT initiatives fresh lease – a model most enterprises are expected to follow during the upturn. “The downturn resulted in green IT trends for datacenters, client devices, and asset lifecycle management,” says Rhonda Ascierto, a Senior Analyst at Datamonitor Research.

Aroop Zutshi, Global President and Managing Partner, Frost & Sullivan, agrees, “We are going to see a significant number of new products and services with a green perspective. Green will drive the recovery a lot more than it has done in the past. Consumers are getting more knowledgeable and more interested in using products and technologies that are green. That will stimulate the market for new types of products and services.”
For some customers, Green IT is not a novel concept but merely another buzzword, deliberately created by vendors to sell their equipment under a fancy name. Yet, 91 percent of the IT decision-makers say that a product’s energy efficiency will be an important or very important criterion in their purchasing decisions in 2010 (according to Symantec Green IT report).

While vendors and customers talk the language of ‘green’, channel partners certainly can’t stay inactive. The IT industry and its products have been and are likely to remain focused on Green IT. The writing’s on the wall and it’s in green.

Mobile Applications

Are Mobile applications going to be the top priority for enterprises in 2010? Some of you may be quite skeptical about it. But a lot in the industry do believe in the potential of mobile applications in enterprises. ‘Cause we’re a humongous country, with smart phones steadily taking over as the chief tool for enterprise communication and collaboration.

As Bill Piatt, the CIO of International Finance puts it, “The only thing that works reliably in emerging markets is cell phones.” And he seems to be right.

And, both IDC and Gartner reaffirm the role of mobile applications among enterprises. According Jones of Gartner, mobile applications are becoming very important to the CIO. IDC, on the other hand, says that India and China would remain the twin engines of growth for the overall mobile segment and especially for smartphones. IDC expects the two countries to collectively chalk up over 295 million units in handset shipments in 2010, which substantiates the potential of mobile application in the country.

What is helping the cause of les portables, as the French like to call it, are chip makers who are developing mobile processors that look like the PC processors of yesteryear says Carl Claunch, a Gartner analyst. He believes that there is an increasing potential to create an environment on cell phones to allow an enormous pool of PC applications on a smart phone.

So what can you expect in 2010? More mobile money transfers, search and browsing applications, mobile health monitoring and cell phone advertising, location-based services, among other things.
What to watch out for: vociferous debates around customizing apps or using a one-size-fits all approach, more security challenges, and users that are smarter than the IT department.

Server Virtualization

While IT media and analysts have been discussing server virtualization for what seems like eons in the technology time-space, IT leaders have been busy implementing it and have made it the most common form of virtualization in enterprise IT today.  There’s more to come, though.

According to Gartner, the year 2010 will see virtual servers handle 28 percent of server workloads, up by a massive 10 percentage points from 18 percent currently. In terms of sheer numbers, there are 5.8 million virtual machines (VM) in use today. Come 2012 and Gartner says half the server workloads will be served by virtual machines.
Industries of all types, be it a telecom player, or a bank or a manufacturing company, are cuddling up to server virtualization.

According to IDC, virtualization will be a cornerstone technology as medium and large enterprise organizations around the globe accelerate the need for more dynamic and converged infrastructure designed to support the business needs of the next economic cycle. IDC’s most recent Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker showed that 16.5 percent of all servers shipped in the second quarter of 2009 were virtualized, representing an increase from 14.5 percent during the same period a year earlier.

As the recession made more companies ‘do more with less’, server virtualization naturally became a top priority for enterprises in 2009 and is going to remain on the top of the list in 2010 too. “In the near future, server virtualization will continue to be adopted primarily for cost savings in power and real estate,” says Sanjay Belsare, Head IT Infrastructure, Kotak Mahindra Bank.

Until now large enterprises have driven server virtualization, but the big growth action is anticipated among small-to-midsize businesses, according to Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman. For most organizations, immaterial of domain and size, the question won’t be whether to virtualize or not, but which VM provider to go with.
There’s another reason virtualization will dominate enterprise IT in 2010: it’s tied to the cloud computing revolution. Enterprises are likely to be considering various strategies from private clouds to public cloud services and hybrid models.

The choice of in-house virtualization platform enterprises make now (and in the near future) are likely to influence their cloud-computing choices. So server virtualization would mean a lot to channel partners as well in 2010, as it would bring countless related opportunities. Roll up your sleeves!

Social Software & Computing, Storage Virtualization

Social Software & Computing

370 million unique visitors in a month, 160 billion page views. These are Google Ad Planner figures for Facebook (August 2009) and are the envy of any online marketing expert.

Really? So why haven’t enterprises found a way — that isn’t lame — to leverage social networks? Maybe because social networking opens new attack vectors. And enterprises are naturally worried about the consequences of social engineering-based attacks.

More telling, however, is the scanty number of companies that have blocked social networking. What does that say? They realize its potential business benefits. But the challenge is to find the right balance between security and usability. And there is reason to stay positive: Every year, more companies dedicate staff to monitoring how employees use online assets -- 57 percent in 2009 compared to 50 percent in 2008 and 40 percent in 2006, according to a CIO-CSO study done in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

And, like it or not, the industry is already moving to develop tools that can harness the power of networking – for businesses with the foresight to take them up. JWT is just one among them. Sunil Mehta, CIO, JWT says, “Social computing can serve a valid business purpose and that’s what we should look for in the near future.” And according to the State of the CIO: 2009, 25 percent of Indian CIOs say that enterprise wikis and blogs will make an impact in the year ahead. Gartner analyst David Cappuccio says, “Social networks are coming into the enterprise whether CIOs want them to or not. Twitter use grew an amazing 1,382 percent in 2008 and the majority of new users were between the ages of 39 and 51.” And this number would have definitely gone up in 2009 and is only going to grow in 2010.

Some good examples of social computing include Novell’s Pulse, an enterprise social networking suite that is integrated with Google’s new Wave application and lets co-workers collaborate on documents. Salesforce.com’s Salesforce Chatter is another social-networking application, a sort of “Facebook for the Enterprise”. It offers APIs which will be available on mobile applications.

It’s a list that is still being populated and we’re going to see more action in 2010. Count on that.

Storage Virtualization

The writing on the wall is clear and neon-loud: enterprise data will grow by 650 percent over the next five years, if current growth patterns are anything to go by. Most of it will be unstructured and not belong to any database. This growth “is going to cost dearly if we don’t pay attention,” says David Cappuccio, of Gartner.

Which is why enterprises are going to pay more attention to technologies like data de-duplication and automated tiering -- and storage virtualization. And let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. “Because it can help enterprises focus on increasing ROI, I believe storage virtualization is a key technology to look out for in the near future,” says Alok Kumar, Global Head-Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services.

By virtualizing storage, the complexities of managing, backing up, archiving, and migrating data across disparate storage devices are reduced. It helps enterprises increase capacity, better utilize their resources, and reduce costs. Virtualization also increases the efficiency of storage; allowing files to be stored wherever there is room, rather than let some drives go underutilized.

In a few short years, storage virtualization or block virtualization, has proven its worth in large enterprises and traveled that well-worn path from pricey boutique solution to an affordable commodity.

That aside, enterprises are coming out of a tough macro-economic climate are showing an increased willingness to invest in storage virtualization in 2010 says research firm TheInfoPro. In fact, it points out that going forward technology purchases will increasingly focus on optimizing existing storage assets, stressing on a six- to 12-month ROI. So, it is undoubtedly going to cost partners dearly if they do not pay attention to the changing storage requirements of their customers.