What will the year 2008 have in store for enterprise IT? There will certainly be pressures and edicts to cut costs and run as mean and lean as possible - as there is every year. But what will be the “hot” trends that may not necessarily reach critical mass, yet will pique everybody’s curiosity this year? Here are some unabashed predictions on the trends that will be on everyone’s minds.
Software as a service will become a “normal” means of software purchasing. SaaS will gain more acceptance in the marketplace, almost to the point where it even becomes “ho-hum” - end-users will no longer even give second thought to where their application is coming from - whether a central server somewhere in their organization, or run by a vendor outside the organization. However, SaaS adoption will continue to be far more popular within smaller companies than larger organizations, which still have huge investments in their own legacy systems to maintain.
There will be plenty of talk about computing in the “cloud.” SaaS will not be limited to applications themselves. Enterprises will be able to grab functionality ranging from databases to messaging systems to storage right from the Internet, while only paying incremental charges for what they actually use. In November, IBM announced its “Blue Cloud” initiative, which supports the running of large-scale applications with massive databases as an on-demand service delivered over the Internet. Already, there are some Internet companies that have been able to launch their businesses on as little as an $80 investment in on-demand infrastructure. Inevitably, companies with large data centers will need to address potential market disruption from competitors with little or no investment in IT infrastructure.
There will be increased interest in event-driven architecture (EDA). A trend running parallel to service-oriented architecture is event-driven architecture. In current SOA structures, the passing of events - such as a customer order - takes place asynchronously, meaning it may be handed off from one system to another, but the second system may not get around to processing its piece of the transaction right away because of other workloads. An EDA approach promises to bring things closer to real-time, meaning that events may be handled more immediately. This is key to service-enabling applications that require real-time performance, such as business intelligence and analytics. Unisphere Research recently surveyed members of SHARE, the independent user group of large IBM systems users, on their plans for EDA, and found that close to 40 percent are deploying or considering event-driven architecture.
Here comes Enterprise Web 2.0
The explosion in collaborative and user-driven computing will reach deeper into enterprises. The cluster of Web 2.0 sites - from mashups to social computing - will add a new dimension to enterprise environments. This new paradigm now gets referred to as “Enterprise 2.0.” How far will this go? Some industry observers say social media sites such as Facebook are becoming more than a college kids’ hangout - they may be the new Intranets. One prominent enterprise software company, Serena Software, is adopting Facebook - with its collaborative capabilities - as its Intranet. Much of the appeal of Web 2.0-based services is that they are available on demand over the Internet, most of the time are free, and can be easily and quickly configured to end user needs.
IT shops will keep moving to simpler and lighter-weight architectures and standards. For years, vendors and standards bodies have been embroiled in developing sophisticated interfaces to drive service-oriented architecture. Lately, however, there’s been a movement afoot to promote more lightweight standards and protocols. This is seen in the rise of the so-called “REST” (for Representative State Transfer) protocols, which can be quickly and easily deployed to call Web services. Also, within enterprise development shops, there’s a growing preference for lightweight languages, such as Perl or PHP, or frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, to more quickly push projects out the door. Companies may be initiating less new application development on heavy frameworks such as Java Enterprise Edition.
Open source will continue to make inroads into the enterprise - and open source enterprise applications may be the next part of this wave. Open source is a phenomenon that I mention in every prediction article, and with good reason. Adoption just keeps growing and growing across enterprises, and far beyond Linux. We regularly cover open source trends as part of Unisphere Research’s survey program with leading user groups, and find most enterprises rely on open source software in their operating systems, middleware/application servers, databases, and development tools. A recent survey of members of the Independent Oracle Users Group, for example, found only a handful of companies, four percent, have actual open source applications running at their sites (such as SugarCRM or Compiere), but this may begin to change in 2008 as well.
About the Author
Joe McKendrick edits 5 Minute Briefing: Data Center, serving the SHARE community. He can be reached at Joe@dbta.com.
