2010: A Year for SUN, Clouds and The Weather?

Having just read Bob Evans’ latest article in Information Week about Larry Ellison’s comments on Oracle’s acquisition of SUN Microsystems – and what that means for the future – I thought I would share some predictions that a few good friends, colleagues and I have thought are likely to be “in store” for us in 2010 when it comes to technology and what business is going to be doing with it (or perhaps needs to think about doing ??).

Trends:

• “Business Out Of The Box” – full industry business process flow models packaged and ported
• Better quality credit, debt and risk management solutions that are integrated with business operations and not just geared to compliance
• Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), especially anything CRM-related, brought back inhouse and more fully automated (thanks to social media!) 
• Cloud Computing hotting up (thanks to Oracle buying SUN)
• Getting into the Cores of Computers - as a lot of software is still written to run in a single thread and so unable to fully exploit multiple cores. [  Thank you to fellow 7C Alliance member, Bruno Girin, for sharing this ] 
• Green Energy getting some traction through Green Transport solutions
• IT outsourcing nearshore (i.e. offshore – but EU only), rather than farshore, due to a mix of data protection as well as carbon footprint considerations
• Data relocation due to data protection laws being enforced
• London gearing up for The Olympics – but also better transport in general, such as Crossrail
• Mergers and Acquisitions in the Banking and Financial Services industry continuing – and Santander especially one to watch 
• Mobile Applications more intelligent and prominent due to smartphone technology maturing.  Indeed, will adoption and use of the smartphone reduce the cash we carry in our wallet and replace the credit card altogether? Click – or slide – on the link to the left for an expert’s view on this!! 
• The “One bill only” concept emerge through businesses such as Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer’s, Tesco’s battle out extending the “one stop shop” supermarket concept to every aspect of household consumer life.  Especially watch Sainsbury’s Bank, Energy,  Telecom, etc – and these seeking to go one step further than Marks and Spencer’s Finance, Tesco Talk, etc
• Recruitment practices reviewed and reengineered in large corporates such as BT, BP and anything else beginning with “B” for British - and also “C” for Computer too… 
• Smartphones, such as the iPhone, Nokia Maemo, Google Android, RIM Blackberry and Palm WebOS becoming commonplace – but the battle being for corporate features, such as email, and consumer features, such as instant messaging with smart handsets
  [  Acknowledgement:  Thank you to fellow 7C Alliance member, Bruno Girin , for correcting me on whose phone is whose from original post on this, and for sharing his interested observer's view on where the war is being waged ]
• Social Media beginning to be used for managing the remote workforce and replacing use of the workplace for meetings and knowledge-sharing  – and so perhaps the emergence of the first “truly virtual office“?

New Skill Requirements to enable all of this:

• CRM, ERP and SCM solutions integration:  following rise and rise of Oracle, after its take-over of SUN 
• Reengineering businesses for effective use of social media – especially in recruitment! Business process mapping, how to manage SEO and “tag cloud” searches on discussion threads, blogs and web-sites that enable greater sentence-like context-based search capability.
• Knowledge and Document Management tied in with Social Media Management – and so boom in use of Sharepoint, PCDOCS, Open Text’s Livelink, Oracle Mix etc
• Mobile applications development:  Java, Linux, Apple
• New HR Supply Chain solutions geared for intelligent context-based searches rather than keywords:  Oracle HCM
• Data Centres that are moved to sustainable locations – and so migration design, application server management and migration, etc required
• IT integrated with renewable energy, and generally more energy-efficient and sustainable – and so skills in virtualisation, power-saving air-conditioning systems, etc
• Applications integration and migration as well as virtualisation  – all becoming paramount as part of the move to the cloud environment as well as “Green IT“
• Database redistribution and disaggregation as well as data migration - due to dangers found with where data is located in public clouds and so move to prove clouds or even back to good old distributed database solutions!
• Data Centre relocation project management and server migration
• Remote project and service management practices, such as PM Online, to complement remote technical support such as PC Anywhere, remote PC, etc.  Watch what BMC , IBM, Numara  and other leading ITSM Framework solutions and service desk support providers do – and get ITIL certified!! 
• Social Media management practices evolving and integrated into both the workplace and daily lives of everyone – including use of the Smartphone and Smartphone applications 

To discuss this list, and add your own predictions to it, then please join me in 7C Alliance’s Open Practice Technology Network - which is run and managed as a discussion group on LinkedIn

Matt Miller

P.S.  What do we call the name of this new decade we are entering?  As it will be no more “the noughties” from now on!! 

About Matt Miller Matt is a Business Member and Founder of the 7C Alliance.  His capability is in the following areas:  Electronic Business (E-business) Enterprise Architecture  Project Management  Social Media Management For a full profile of Matt’s capability and request his advice or services to assist, please send an email to contact@7c-alliance.com or call 7C Alliance Limited on 0844 844 2470 to arrange a time and place to meet and talk with Matt.

7C Alliance Limited is a  business registered in the UK, reg:  05127352 and is proud to manage the administration and support of the 7C Alliance. See http://www.7c-alliance.com  for more details about 7C Alliance Limited

Tags: Blackberry, carbon footprint, Cloud Computing, CRM, data center, data centre, data centre relocation, data protection, Google Android, Green Energy, iPhone, ITIL, Livelink, London Olympics, Mobile Applications, Nokia Maemo, Open Text, Oracle, Outsourcing, Palm WebOS, Recruitment, RIM Blackberry, Sharepoint, smartphone, social media, SUN, SUN Microsystems, The Olympics, Vodafone