Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies For Next 4 Years 163
Dr. Jim writes "The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years. The usual suspects including multi-core chips, virtualization, and cloud computing are on the list. Multicore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes, and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes."
Forgetting one thing (Score:5, Insightful)
What security?
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Re:Forgetting one thing (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have a shop that has a very large compute farm that runs exclusively, batch jobs, then you can clearly understand where cloud computing can be a tremendous advantage. A lot of users of batch compute resources find creative ways to serialize and/or parallelize their overall process using scripts, multiple hosts, dependencies, etc. With cloud computing, all of this can be implemented automatically.
That's a huge time and cost saver right there alone. Additionally, with our cloud computing solution (Electric Cloud), we get an additional advantage with the built in virtualization that comes along with the system. In the old days, we were forced to manage multiple development build stacks to satisfy the needs of multiple business units or departments. Now, we manage a cloud of hosts that are baseline installs, with bare minimal configurations, and the submit host's environment is replicated to the cloud nodes when a build is kicked off. This saves money on hardware resources, hardware resources, engineering resources, etc.
You may think, well, most developers use the same build stack or tool stack - but that's an assumption that has been proven incorrect time and time again where I work. We work with embedded device developers and they have a very specific tool stack requirement, with specific versions, or may need a pristine build environment without the possibility of conflicts from various packages that may be installed on the build host.
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What the hell is wrong with people? wow.
Re:Forgetting one thing (Score:5, Informative)
He left off a word!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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Small companies that aren't IT based could hire a contractor to take care of it for them without any issues.
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Dinosaur age mainframes (and their applications) however... I've never seen it work properly because all systems are just 'too different' from each other and too much documentation has to be written (which isn't read or available).
Re:Forgetting one thing (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if this balance tips, companies will benefit while IT staff loses. I consider this a possible future scenario, so I live well within my means and use a large percentage of my salary to buy ownership positions in those very companies that stand to profit from my obsolesce. That way, even if I lose in one way I win in another.
The stock market really is an amazing force for blurring the line between the working class and the ownership class, and I take full advantage of this power.
Re:Forgetting one thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I think it allows businesses to do more IT functions with less hardware. The staff still have to manage it. Otherwise you have an excellent strategy for retirement
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Now, an entire system is created almost instantly by duplicating an existing VM image. DR and backups are automatic. This requires much less time (= less IT staff).
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You're right if you mean to say that most companies don't do security properly. You're wrong if you mean to say that most companies can't or won't make moves to do security properly in this new world.
The fact is that hackers will have access to the power of massive parallelization in the cloud just as companies will. The difference is that hackers will have to find a way to continuously monetize the cycles and bandwidth they use if they're going to attack on a massive scale using the cloud. Either that,
Misleading summary; lean blog post (Score:5, Informative)
The article summary quotes a blog posting, *NOT* the Gartner study. Further, the blog posting only quotes the top ten items from Gartner, and provides no further data.
The blogger is passing around FUD, without supporting those statements with any information from Gartner. This is a non-article with so little data.
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Well of course it does. The submitter is the blogger, who must have needed some page hits for some reason. That's the second reason I didn't RTF(blog). The first is the name "Gartner" who will, of course, say anything as long as you're paying them enough.
Re:Misleading summary; lean blog post (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally from year to year half the items would disappear from the lists (even though they were supposed to cover the next 5-10 years). In addition another quarter would randomly move about the "You'll see this technology in X years".
Most of the rest were so obvious that it really wasn't worth mentioning, an up to speed person would have known that. Wireless will be big in the future (published 2005ish)? No way!
The descriptions given for a technology(typically 2-3 paragraphs) were filled with jargon, and not terribly useful. Reading Popular Science and Mechanics was about as useful and far cheaper.
So yes, the lesson is that you can't buy innovation or management skills for a company by spending 20,000 a year, but you can make a nice sum pretending to sell it.
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The best part is that the Gartner reports I've seen ususally cost about $400 and probably average 8-10 pages. Not worth it in my opinion but then again for corporations who believe Gartner reports are prophecy I guesz $400 for a multi-billion dollar company isn't a big deal.
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Most of the rest were so obvious that it really wasn't worth mentioning, an up to speed person would have known that. Wireless will be big in the future (published 2005ish)? No way!
The best part is that the Gartner reports I've seen ususally cost about $400 and probably average 8-10 pages. Not worth it in my opinion but then again for corporations who believe Gartner reports are prophecy I guesz $400 for a multi-billion dollar company isn't a big deal.
Right, in a large corporation, when a new tool or application is brought in, it usually has to go through an architectural review, a readiness review, and various other reviews. One thing corporations like to know is whether or not the company that they are about to dump $10k per seat (much, much more in a lot of cases, I'm just throwing that number out there) license on is going to be around in 5 years when the corporation is neck deep in the implementation of that product. This is where the Gartner group
Re:Misleading summary; lean blog post (Score:4, Informative)
And this is different from stuff actually by Gartner how? This is Gartner we are talking about, so if they did publish such a study, a more accurate title might be, "Top 10 technologies we have a vested financial interest in promoting"
You made me Laugh (Score:2)
Pay wall? (Score:2)
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Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
You've just summed up most Gartner reports. =)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
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Ha! Amazing the subtle difference between "obvious advice" and "obviously bad advice".
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And is not all that obvious to most of the people who are just keeping up with computers rather than computing.
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on the fly reconfigurable FPGA
I've often thought that was the eventual course for making computers more like the human brain. We give up speed in specific, pre-defined problems for flexibility and higher speed for general problems with the ability to adapt to new ones (at least theoretically). With scripting languages, you could swap out, in real time, the most used functions into FPGAs. Need a fast string analyzer for the next ten minutes? Done. Need some fast array sorting for an hour? Done.
Of course, I'm a software guy, so I can
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It looks to me a solution with the same problems as microprogramming : looks good in theory, but too many strings attached in practice.
One of the biggest obstacles I see is the fact that this FPGA does not run on its own : you need several interfaces (hard and soft) to the chip.
How Gartner Works (Score:2)
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Duh. Gartner's target readers are not people who've been watching computers for the past year. Gartner's targets are the people who pay other people to watch computers, so that those people can pretend to know what they are talking about when they discuss new technologies with their minions.
That's for generic articles like this one; Gartner does some targeted research and analysis that's better, particularly if you pay a
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Informative)
Gartner is mainly known for two things:
- "Duh"
- Being wrong.
Oh, and charging a lot. cf. Cringley's fine column on Gartner. [pbs.org]With high gas prices... (Score:2, Funny)
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict the next 4 years in technology is going to be similar to this year. This will end up being correct for generous definitions of "similar".
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From TFA (Score:2, Informative)
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics
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2. "Fabric computing"? WTF is "Fabric computing"? Wikipedia leaves me ignorant, as does TFA. When I saw the phrase I thought of the first computer I ever saw [kuro5hin.org] in 1964. It was attached to a loom and wove a cloth bookmark out of thread with a design you entered with a very primitive light pen. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life, but I doubt it's what these stupid yuppies are referring to.
4. Cloud compu
IT envisioned as "truckers and longshoremen" (Score:2)
So are we now to believe that a "truckers and longshoremen" skills shortage shows need for an increase of the 85,000 H-1B visas already available?
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The summary says, "the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes."
This is similar to what Manos
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Why yes! It is trolling.
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I'm not sure about the tone. Was he saying that IT would be so simple a longshoreman could do it? Or that a longshoreman would be better than some IT workers?
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Please connect 1MW power source here -->
Please connect 1MW generator here -->
Please connect OC-192 here -->
Not the case... (Score:4, Interesting)
But borne from the ashes of the 'centralized IT department' come the 'social networking support department'. Because no matter how intuitive you make it, someone won't get it. That fact, combined with the problem that the larger your corporation becomes, the more obfuscated every little thing is (I work for GE).
Contextual Computing is hilarious (Score:4, Funny)
There is a lot of room to make big mistakes in this area of computing. Contextual Computing can lead to hilarious failures.
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High-level, better-trained IT workers opportunity! (Score:5, Insightful)
But, by outsourcing/concentrating the server-side administration to the "cloud", you might free up IT workers to do less grunt work and do more in terms of process innovations, making the whole enterprise more efficient. IT workers will have to think about how they can make the business operate more efficiently, and be creative and get it implemented. Are today's IT workers ready for that level of thinking?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! [nerdkits.com]
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IT Departments tend to work on keeping things running and less time analysing the buisness needs and seeing how IT can help improve it. In places that have such departments they companies run very well. When they focus on keeping things running... Things just fail.
Re:High-level, better-trained IT workers opportuni (Score:5, Interesting)
Much like outsourcing has come to be more expensive, so too will 'outsourcing' your data center. I'm sure that we've all heard of DDoS attacks. How convenient will they become when your data is on the other side of a router from your workers? Yeah, the SLAs sound good on paper, but oat 4:30 on a Friday of a long weekend, when your billing processes grind to a halt, how long will it take to get fixed? My personal favorite is the data center people telling me it is an application error. The billing department is telling me that their application is giving an error that a server can't be found. My code says that there is a permission problem on a network directory, and no one left in the data center has admin rights on that box.
Yep, this outsourcing thing will work out well.
What was that old saying? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself? Sometimes it is true, ya know?
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as always : out-sourcing or off-shoring ? Our IT department consists of only a couple of in-house people, the rest is out-sourced. However, these out-sourced people are always on-site, so this does nor make a difference in head count, only in bookkeeping strategy.
Re:High-level, better-trained IT workers opportuni (Score:4, Insightful)
Puh-lease. Today's IT workers can't get our users to access network file shares rather than filling the mail spool with the same attachments (And a million revisions thereof) over and over and over... And in the few cases I've seen where people (always at least "engineers", not just your typical office staff) do use a NAS, they constantly come asking for help when they try to send outside contacts links to internal files. It seems that people have some sort of mental wall around the ideas of "local" and "not local", with no middle-ground possible. And god forbid you actually make such access secure - Users will actually burn CDs and pass them back and forth rather than even attempt to navigate the simplest of login prompts.
So no, I don't worry about finding myself unneeded any time soon - Regardless of how easy the technology gets to use, the actual users still won't get it. And they'll need us to help them get that 10.1MB file (that the email system keeps rejecting) to Fred in Accounting - Who will then need our help opening the file.
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Re:High-level, better-trained IT workers opportuni (Score:2)
My experience with IT at my job is that the people who do SAP have the knowledge (they come from the mainframe era), but the people who do the PCs don't (they are people that think they know about computers because they can find the on switch and know how to reboot using Ctrl-Alt-Del).
Old! (Score:5, Funny)
On another note, an unknown company is bringing out a sewing application that promises to push multithreading to it's limits.
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Outsourced information will come back (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess even our business captains know that putting information into hands you can't control is a BAD idea. They should know. They've been gathering ours for years, and they know what value even trivial information (like your shopping habits) has.
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And se
Troubleshooting Step #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Troubleshooting Step #1: Make sure it's plugged in.
Ergo, there will always be a need for IT staff co-located with the boxes.
Something Old, Something New (Score:4, Funny)
Some/most of these things exist already, some of them are in use and relevant. Others are just excuses for avoiding work.
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Yes, they are a reply to the article. I presume that when you posted, you had not actually read it.
The purpose of the links in the /. article is to actually inform you. They are not there because they are a pretty colour...
Centralized IT isn't going away (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon EC2 only provides you with servers. You still need system admins to configure and run and debug the boxes if you're doing anything remotely complicated.
It does solve provisioning issues, procurement issues and lights-out management. But that is just a sliver of centralized IT.
And having Amazon provide "remote hands" for you to replace failed hardware is not even a "centralized" part of IT. Even without cloud computing you shouldn't have your IT organization tightly coupled to where your sites are. All that you need is the occasional physical hardware replacement, and management of the facilities (power, cooling, etc).
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I've been looking at open source ERP solutions (ERP5, Adempiere, etc.) and it makes me wonder whether you could set up a company that configures and manages servers and ERP systems. The actual boxes could be at your place or elsewhere.
Basically, you can offer companies a complete package for HR, order management, invoicing, payroll, etc. without them having to hire a single extra person. You'd have to have a clause in the contract t
Re:Centralized IT isn't going away (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I'm responding to a very strong statement saying that cloud computing will "make centralized IT go away". And while it may do so for small business, which needs a couple dozen servers to run some "web 2.0" apps or a storefront or whatever, I doubt it will have much of an impact on the IT staffs at S&P 500 companies.
If you look closely at Amazon's SLAs as well, they aren't going to be acceptable to most large companies. Financial institutions might be able to outsource some offline batch analysis and model crunching to EC2, but their online transactional processing that needs just stupid reliability isn't going to be transferable to Amazon's cloud.
You are correct though that by sheer number, most companies are small and most companies don't have very complicated IT needs. However, "cloud computing will make centralied IT go away" is just silly if you've got a background at centralized IT at large companies.
There will still be a lot of IT out there, it may just be bigger IT, and some of the small IT may be eliminated, or it may turn contract work.
Uh, Excuse me! (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you access the "cloud" without a computer next to you?
You have DSL embedded in your brain?
Get a clue. Companies may not have conventional desktop PCs in their offices, but they're going to have to have SOME sort of computing device - if nothing but a thin client or even just a flat screen terminal or a BlackBerry - to access the computing resources.
And those devices need servicing - if not much servicing.
Anybody who thinks computers are leaving offices is so frickin' deluded I don't know what to say.
Not to mention that your IT staff exists mostly to solve the problems with the SOFTWARE - not the hardware. And software problems aren't going away regardless of whether it's on the desk, on a server, or in the cloud.
Who deals with those problems may change. Companies may very well outsource their IT support - I am the outsource for my clients - but all that means is they'll pay more for less (except in my case, 'cause I'm cheap.) Their overall cost may go down, but in many cases they'll get poorer service because the IT staff servicing their problems isn't a member of the company or on site and thus has less comprehension of the company's needs. There's nothing like being on site and in daily contact with the staff to see what a company's problems are.
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If the servers were no longer my responsibility, my job would change very little.
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Well, close anyway. I work on the servers a lot, but there are more servers than people. I'd still have a lot to do.
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for low values of "change the world" (Score:2)
No one NEEDs Facebook. I'm actively considering deleting my account, personally. No one is going t
cloud computing is latest buzzword (Score:3, Insightful)
Augmented reality (Score:2)
The only thing I could come up with is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_(Star_Trek) [slashdot.org]>this
Is it "more real than real"?
Or is it just the latest buzzword to describe something nobody has thought of yet?
I'm completely stumped, really I am.
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BTW, your link is wrong; it leads back to this article. I believe this [wikipedia.org] is the link you are looking for. However, a better link is here [reference.com] (a dictionary lookup of the word "cyborg").
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Intersting (Score:2)
Managerial Porn (Score:2)
Ohhh yesss.
Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps.
Ohhh! Ohhh! Ahhh!
no need to have the IT staff
Cumshot
Let's say this isn't another Gartner managerial fairy tale for a minute. Where, ***exactly*** are the cost savings? I just priced a 16-way dl380 g5 for about $5000 with drives and lots of ram. I would run out of bandwidth before I ran out of computing horsepower. That's soon to be the price of a pound of peanut
IT Pronounced DOA for the 439th time .... (Score:2, Insightful)
I support over 180 teaching staff and 30 administrative staff + 2000 HS students using about 700 computers.
Many of the staff are quite comfortable users - but 98% of them have their real job focus "teaching students". Yes they use technology but their focus is staying abreast of new trends in Math - science - History
Multicore has been changing the world for years. (Score:2)
They've been providing massive crunch in internet routers for years.
Now that I look at it... (Score:2)
Listing a bunch of paradigm-shifters that are years old but still on an adoption rampup may be useful when trying to plan for the future. But it's a pretty simple algorithm for generating reports, not something particularly insightful.
The outsourcing mania (Score:2)
Most of the enthusiasm for "software as a service" comes from companies selling the services. The problem they face is that most companies have already purchased the hardware and applications they need, and they don't need to buy them again. This is Microsoft's big problem. Really, once you made it to Windows 2000 and Word 97, office applications worked pretty well. So why buy them again? Most of the additions since then benefited Microsoft more than the user.
The trouble with "cloud computing" (otherwi
10 out of 10 for stating the obvious (Score:2)
Really, the items on this list are so old they smell bad.
Multicore processors - not exactly novel, plus it's just another way of packaging multi-processor systems that have been around for decades. The only new attribute is that they're coming down in price.
Social networks? what planet have these guys been on for the last 5 years?
Even better "user interface" at number 6.
Frankly I'm surprised that Web 2 didn't make it. Maybe they disguised that as #5, web
User Interface? Semantics? (Score:4, Funny)
Some poor IT guy is going to have a lot of complicated explaining to do when the CIO pounds his fist on his desk and yells "go get us some user interface and semantics!"
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Unified I/O (Score:2)
This isn't akin iSCSI which had the painful overhead of TCP optimizations. While not aimed at the SMB market (who iSCSI is fine for), users that manage midsize to large datacenters will not be
Gartner couldn't reveal a flashlight in a darkroom (Score:2)
I can't remember a single insightful thing they ever had to say.
Their predictions are usually blindingly obvious or wrong.
Management speak (Score:2)
Management speak just keeps getting more & more powerful. Feel the power of these sentences.
"you need to know what your firm does, and even more importantly, how it does it."
We need to take charge people.
IT is going to be much more about IT. Got to grow & prosper to grow and prosper. Got to succeed to succeed. Got to build the makings of greatness to make greatness.
Yes! (Score:2)
This IT function is going to leave the IT department as we know it today and will migrate into the business unit itself. What this means to you is that you need to know what your firm does, and even more importantly, how it does it.
Yes! At last some people with common sense. I'd hire them straight away.
And no, I'm not joking. I will always prefer a moderately skilled IT guy who has a sense of what the firm needs to achieve and how he can contribute to it, over the most brilliant IT mind that's only interested in maintaining his servers in all their glorious gleaming perfection.
I need the first person. On-site, for direct support and face-to-face discussion of how we can best achieve our goals. If I ever need the second, I'll con
Quick Everyone! (Score:2)
I augmented my reality last night... (Score:2)
Man, that pepperoni and cheese with onion was some great augmentation.
How will you augment your reality today?
P.S. Web Mashups are soooooo 2 years ago.
These aren't news! (Score:2)
All those buzzwords have appeared dozens of times, at an increasing rate, in all our favourite IT news sites.
Like SlashDot.
User Interface and Ubiquitous computing are "the technologies of the future" since 30 years now!
And along with clouds come the storm... (Score:2)
One only has to look at how lousy the broadband industry is performing within the United States versus most foreign nations broadband networks to get an idea of what to expect
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- 85% of desktops run linux[1]
- Duke Nuke Forever is released
[1] The other 15% run Hurd.