Vizitag: See | Snap | Sorted

Congratulations! You made it to 2010. Welcome to the next decade in technology innovation that will change the world!

I resisted putting together a list of predictions for the coming year, mainly because like many people I tend to predict too much change in the near term, and not enough over a decade.

That being said, there are certain areas of technology that will undergo significant changes making them interesting to watch.

In my opinion, we are quickly approaching a technological inflection point that will result in innovations that we could not have even imagined just 10 to 20 years ago.  So here are my observations of 5 key trends to watch for the coming decade.

1. The technological platform evolution from mainframe, to client/server, to the Internet, cloud computing and web2.0 should continue shifting towards ubiquitous platform convergence with a variety of devices such as, tablets, netbooks, and smart phones among others vying for dominance in the marketplace which I think of as, “Thin-Net platform wars“, with “Thin” being the client device platform (most likely mobile), and “Net” being the ease of intelligent connectivity to networks from home to public wi-fi, Internet, and corporate networks.
2. We should continue to see many more interesting uses and variations on the theme of cloud computing – Public, Private, Hybrid, Community, Government, Industry, Integration, Communications, and other potential configurations of offerings delivered “as-a-service” in the future.
   • Single function clouds will evolve to deliver a suite of service offerings to their clients or be acquired by others providing multiple cloud service offerings, as clients will not want to manage an endless stream of cloud service providers for every workload they outsource.  As a result,
   • We can expect both an increase in new entrants to this segment as well as consolidation with larger players acquiring attractive assets such as Salesforce.com.
   • With increased adoption of cloud computing, and the need for management of multiple cloud service provider relationships, demand for partner relationship management offerings should increase (unless one stop shop becomes the dominant model for cloud services).
3. Key to all these inter cloud connections will be networking and communications.  As corporate functions become external to the organization, the connectivity infrastructure to access those resources not only becomes more important, but must support a greater degree of traffic. Increased availability of wireless broadband, and public wi-fi will be a catalyst accelerating interactive network communications.
4. Social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others will continue to lead in the decline of anonymity on the Internet, and privacy will increasingly become a quaint notion of the 20th century.  Offline, combining search with augmented reality will have a similar effect by the end of the decade.  With a smart device and access to facial recognition tools there will be little one can’t find out about anyone seen in public.
5. Telepresence and unified communications should continue to increase in use, specially as they become less expensive and more widespread decreasing the need for face to face meetings.  I expect continued consolidation of telecommunications assets including the acquisition of Skype, and completion of the migration to IP by the end of the decade for large telecommunications providers.

There you have it, a conservative vision of what the coming decade in technology may look like.

Will there be other key innovations? 

Absolutely.

I expect more online capabilities making their appearance offline and vice versa, and I look forward to many new scientific discoveries enabled by technology, but if I knew what tomorrow held, blogging about the future wouldn’t be any fun at all.