2010 Ends and a New Year Begins

Now that 2010 has ended and 2011 arrives we need to consider what will be the major advances and changes in the coming year and the future. There used to be a distinct split between the consumer and corporate advances but that is becoming more blurred now and many consumer tech advances are crossing over very quickly.

2010 – Keep Taking the Tablets

In 2010 several technologies became the darlings of the industry. The tablet computer came back in to view with the launch of the iPad. Nearly 4 million were sold since the launch and all of the major vendors are now looking at bringing their versions to market.

2010 – The Year of the “Cloud”

With the rise of the ipad and the ongoing popularity of Microsoft’s Windows 7 the term “Cloud Computing” came into the public vocabulary. This technology change has been on the cards for some time and many of the major suppliers have been building their massive infrastructures in order to support the on-demand model. One of the biggest players in the space, Amazon, when the Wikileaks supporting hackers tried to bring the site down and all Amazon did was turn the tap up until the hackers ran out of capacity unlike Visa and Mastercard whose sites were brought down by the attack.

2010 – The ongoing rise of the Smartphone

As well as changes is form factor and the rise of the “cloud” smartphones became more and more important in the market place and this led to the move to purchasing APPS and using them. This really has shifted the thought process and usage patterns of people and is really intriguing to see where this leads. Combining mobility with the cloud, location and very specific APPS has totally changed the game for the user.

2011 – The Continued Rise of the Cloud

This leads on to the key point of this post and that is what are the future technologies that will be the drivers for change in 2011. I feel that cloud computing will continue to grow and will somehow cross over into the corporate world. I don’t mean that companies will develop there own “clouds” as that really defeats the object of the cloud!! I mean that organisations will look at the major vendors to run and manage certain applications to see if this will work. There will be lots of challenges with this in terms of pricing and support agreements but it will be worth the investment as the advantages of a fluid infrastructure are appealing.

2011 – Corporates to Take the Tablets

The changes in form factor and the move to the tablet will be more of a challenge in the corporate world as it is difficult to see the benefit. Obviously for many years sales and marketing departments have embraced these new forms and it is in that area or in the customer facing area that the tablet will become more acceptable. Whether we will see the tablet outside these departments is difficult to asses at the moment but with the mobility aspects of the technology and the extended battery life you only need to let your mind wonder a bit and you can start seeing the benefits.

2011 – The Corporate APPS

To me one of the most interesting advances and one that I can see as a game changer is the use of apps and app stores. In the major corporates over the years investments has been massive in huge monolithic enterprise or transaction based systems that are still being used and enhanced to this day. Millions have been spent with large vendors to make these systems support the business.

However with the advent of APPS there could be an opportunity to develop small little snipits of functionality that can be plugged into the legacy systems that perform very specific activities. The trend started a while ago with the concept of Software as a Service but in reality this hasn’t really caught on as in most organisations it is a solution looking for a problem.

Most corporates have a core database and core processing functionality (back-end) that it doesn’t really matter what it looks like, however at the User Interface (UI) point is where these APPS can come into their own and improve the experience and as a result improve the productivity of the user.