Every year about this time, technology industry magazines are filled with articles describing the new technologies that will have the greatest impact on your business in the coming year. They also discuss the technologies that are fading – either because everybody’s got it, or it has been usurped by one of the new ones. I’ve found that most of these predictions are about as accurate as my 1995 prediction that we’d all be talking to our computers by the year 2000. The crazy thing about the rapid pace of technology is that no one really knows what the next big thing will be. It’s hard for any of us to know that we want something that doesn’t exist. Ah, but when we see it, we wonder how we ever got along without it. Here are some of the things that my industry believes will impact your business next year.
- Green technology. The focus here is on energy consumption. This is the next great hype since Y2K consulting. Now that Al Gore has a Nobel Prize, every American feels compelled to go green. The problem is that most of the newly labeled “green technology” is the same stuff with a new label. In most of our offices we can’t generate enough savings from replacing our current technology with green technology. Instead, start turning your computer (and monitor) off when you leave and you can sleep well knowing you’ve done your part.
- Unified Communications. This is the more important sounding name for the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) push. There are many advantages to migrating to a VOIP telephone system. We did it in our office recently and are still finding ways that it helps. However, the cost of a new telephone system is significant. When the time comes to switch, you certainly should switch to a VOIP system. Until then, keep what you’ve got.
- Virtualization. This is the process by which we take a single piece of computer hardware and create multiple instances of the operating system (not necessarily the same OS even). There are several things making this appealing. First, most computers spend most of their time waiting for something to do, but we don’t want to give the same computer too much because the different responsibilities often come into conflict. Through virtualization, we can use the same hardware and minimize the conflicts. Additionally, when using virtual machines, the entire machine configuration is held in a single file, which means we can backup the entire machine by making a backup of that file. Even better, we can take that file and run it on any machine, making disaster recovery much faster.
- Web 2.0 (and 3.0). Web 2.0 services are usually described as those sites that involve some element of social networking. Because of that, pundits have started using Web 3.0 to describe the websites that take advantage of the ability for one website to send and receive data to another website. As more core services become web-delivered, the ability to share data between them makes them behave more like desktop applications.
- Everything-As-A-Service. This started when the web-delivered applications stopped being delivered by Application Service Providers (ASPs) and started instead being called Software-As-A-Service (SAAS). Since then, the moniker has been given to every aspect of technology as in Hardware-As-A-Service, Infrastructure-As-A-Service, Telephony-As-A-Service, and on and on. You will likely experience SAAS in some aspect of your business in the coming year. The others will probably take a while.
- Social Software. I know. I already mentioned this in number 4, but this has the kind of potential that being able to talk to you computer has. I’ll keep it on my list for the next decade if it takes that long for someone to find the killer app. Through social networking, you gain the benefit of the wisdom of crowds, but you get to select the people who make up the crowd. A real useful business application has yet to arrive, but I’m watching developments at Facebook and waiting for someone to produce a rival to LinkedIn that gives real business benefit.
- Microsoft. In the past few years, things have been fairly calm in Redmond. In 2007, we saw the new desktop operating system (Windows Vista) and the new desktop applications (Office 2007). They will start to show up in your office next year. On top of that, the new server operating system (Windows Server 2008) and the new mail server (Exchange 2007) will arrive. These last two will move to 64 bit operations in small businesses. The introduction and learning curve will be painful, but there will be some benefits that make it worthwhile in the end.
Most of these items will have fewer impacts than the IT industry experts believe, but these are probably the ones to watch, along with my favorites: portable computing and voice activation. I’ll keep you posted.