A season of mellow fruitfulness

Pro

1 April 2005

At this new departure, what better time to look into the crystal ball and try to speculate on what 2004 will hold for the IT industry and those who make their living by deciding how best to specify, deploy and maintain information technology for the benefit of their employers?

For a start, there appears to be genuine hope that the worst of the recession is over. However, there’s a little bit of Comical Ali lurking within every business leader when asked to comment on their company’s future. Even if the immediate prospects are as bleak as the enemy tanks appearing at the end of the street, there is still a brave face to be put on and an optimistic message to be relayed to the media.

That being said, local optimism is now being shared by the market analysts whose role it is to predict the key trends in the IT sector over the next 12 months. Allowing for some differences of opinion over the way they segment the overall market into different sectors, both Gartner and IDC are confident of renewed growth in the Irish IT during 2004.

So much for the scientific approach of those whose data models purport to be able to predict to the nearest $100k what the worldwide market for, say, smart handheld devices will be worth in 2007. ($42,770,400,000 if you must know). What follows are the empiric, unscientific and speculative predictions of the long-time IT hack, based on what are commonly known as ‘hunches’.

Speaking of smart handheld devices: this should be the year they take off. IDC certainly believes so and although I cannot think of a single compelling application that will make such a device a ‘must have’, the combination of convenience and ‘cool’ will sooner or later result in it becoming indispensable.
Having already tasted the delights of wireless Internet access using a Vodafone GPRS card and a laptop, I never want to go back to fixed-line dialup from home, which usually involves sitting at the end of the stairs hoping that the busted RJ11 socket doesn’t fall out of the modem slot. If the handset and PDA makers can combine user-friendly personal organiser features with reliable telephone technology, and get the pricing right, ie cheap, the result will be a no brainer.

Even if they can’t, the rapid rollout of wireless LAN ‘hotspots’, the emergence of Centrino – effectively ‘wireless inside’ – as the standard for notebook computers, and the ready availability of GPRS networks, will whet the appetite of computer users for ever more portable communication devices.

This year could be a make or break one for Linux in the enterprise. Its appeal to the erudite and budget-conscious technologist is unquestioned. The support given to it by the leading software companies such as Oracle is compelling – market leading software without the traditional penalty of big proprietary hardware.
But although everybody knows, nudge nudge, wink wink, the two or three major companies and organisations who have migrated key systems over to it, none of them are too keen to shout about it just yet. Maybe this year?

Microsoft, of course, is not taking this lying down and is fighting back against Open Source software with all of its considerable might. It has had some success in encouraging its larger customers to voluntarily lock themselves into the Windows/Office suite for three years with its annuity-based pricing campaigns.
It is also winning considerable support for its Visual Studio.Net development tools. (Why is it so less anal about licence compliance for its development software than it is for its end-user products?) No doubt, the battle between the Java development environment and Visual Studio for the hearts and minds of the next generation of programmers will continue apace.

Speaking of Java brings us on to the sorry sight of Sun Microsystems, once the self-proclaimed ‘dot in dot.com’ and now threatened with being reduced to a speck. As its traditional market of lucrative proprietary Unix servers has started to shrink disastrously, Sun has had to do what everybody else did years ago and adopt Intel-based hardware.

The difference is that, whereas HP candidly admits that its legacy proprietary architectures, PA-RISC and Alpha, are on the way out, Sun’s chief executive, Scott McNealy – when he wasn’t dismissing such questions (Sun Network conference, Berlin, December 2003) as irrelevant nonsense… akin to a car buyer worrying about piston rings and brake shoes – angrily insisted that the SPARC architecture remains a key strategic weapon in the company’s arsenal.
How he’s going to make that work in a world where there are two competing Intel-compatible processor architectures and enterprise software developers throwing their weight behind Linux, is a mystery to me, but I’m a simple lad.

On the regulatory front at home, corporate governance could be a buzz word that many will be hearing. Already in America, reaction to WorldCom and Enron has bred the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with its emphasis on greater and more candid record keeping. Where American regulation leads, European best practice tends to follow. Expect more bureaucracy in your IT departments and in your information systems.

All of this promises an industry looking forward to a period of staid growth, in contrast to the hype and mania of the recent dot.com boom – an air of reality, rather than wonder – which would be no bad thing.

Happy New Year!

David D’Arcy, EDITOR

06/01/04

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