IT and Software Trends that will

make the difference in the Future

-R.A.S. Ravi Sankar
Date: 17-Jan-08

IT trends : Topics to be covered
1. Biometrics
2. Browser based Computing
3. Business Intelligence & Analytics
4. Open Source
5. Printing
6. Software as a Service
7. Service Oriented Architecture
8. Unified Threat Management
9. Storage
10. Unified Communications
11. Virtualization Technologies
12. Web 2.0

1. Biometrics: the story so far
Banks have embraced biometrics as the 2
nd

layer of authentication.
Action has moved beyond fingerprint scans
to other forms.
Biometric information can be stored in smart
cards provided to an individual.
Forget bulky scanners, miniaturization is in
vogue
Biometrics: Story so far (contd..)
Iris scans uses the features in the iris of the
human eye (blood vessel patterns)
Voice recognition
Hand geometry scans Used in 1996
Olympic games to control access to the
Olympic village, tracking 65000 people
Veins in an individuals palm can be tracked
using infrared radiation
Biometrics: Future Technologies
Heart Beat authentication
Ear Shape authentication
Body salinity level based authentication
-The level of salinity in humans is used for
authentication as they are said to be unique in
everyones body.
Another technology similar to this is body Odor
recognition, where sensors capture bodys scent
from hands and other intrusive parts of the body.
2. Browser based Computing: Story so
far
Evolution of online office suites gives users
advantage of accessing their documents
from anywhere.
Desktops became browser-based with the
introduction of Web Operating systems
Services like web-based meetings, shared
online workspace gained momentum.
Adobe launches online photo editing service

Browser based Computing: a peek into
future
We are going to see more and more desktop apps
becoming browser based
Adobe has launched a service to edit photos online
Video editing through browser will catch up A
company Jumpcut, recently acquired by Yahoo,
provides basic video editing through browser, and
there are many patents filed for browser-based video
editing.
Vendors are coming up with offline access to web
apps.
3. Business Intelligence & Analytics:
the story so far
Lots of company acquisitions happened in the BA
domain this year by BI solutions companies.
- Business Objects by SAP, Cognos by IBM,
Hyperion Solutions by Oracle, Knightbridge solutions
by HP
Microsoft has released tools that allows you to
analyze business data in excel.
Tools are readily available off the shelf for specific
industry verticals. For eg, in a manufacturing
scenario, the BA tool would be able to analyze the
supply chain data and quickly predict the demands
or other things from it.
Business Intelligence & Analytics:
Future trends
To enable different business processes and
functions to interact with each other, SOA based
applications would be required
- (ERP, and CRM etc)
BI solutions are becoming more device friendly. BI
systems identify the type of device thats sending the
BI query. This could for instance be an excel file if
the query is coming from a PC, or a WAP compatible
table if the query comes from a smart phone, or a
SMS if the query comes from a mobile phone.

4. Open Source: story so far
Linux for IT infrastructure, enterprise business
applications, desktops, laptops, embedded systems,
and appliances etc.
CVS, based on client server architecture.
Torrents Using this, one can establish a
connection between two systems over internet and
exchange data, helping developers to easily share
their software across the globe.
App level firewall is meant to restrict certain
applications to access only those resources that an
application needs to complete a process
Open Source: A quick peek into the
future
Touch me: An open source alternative to the new
Microsoft surface technology.
Computer cluster: As open source clustering
solutions are available, deployment of clusters at a
larger scale will take up.
Linux distros: The desktop level OSes such as
Fedora and OpenSUSE are gaining momentum.
Cross Platform Integration: With the strategic
alliance between Novell and Microsoft, SuSE
Enterprise Linux from Novell has the capability to
understand all Office 2007 file formats in Openoffice.
5. Printing : Story so far
Outsourced printer management has become
popular
Color lasers have become better, faster, and more
affordable for the office
Trendy inkjets and even lasers were launched
Universal printer drivers have become common,
saving a lot of admin hassles
Compact, color laser-based MFPs have hit the
market
Printing : Fast forward
Wireless printing: Eliminating even the Bluetooth dongle.
Universal printer drivers will allow printing from any
device printer, PDA, laptop, mobile phone as long as
they are placed at a certain distance from printer.
Variable data printing: Large-scale use of VDP to provide
ultra-personalization beyond compare, arising out of a
capacity to print 1000s of copies within minutes, each
page different from each other.
3D printing: So far, you print on a flat paper. In the future,
you print out paper boxes and structures, the way you
have seen them objects, buildings, and everything in
between.
6. Software as a Service : Story so far
What is it: Principle of providing users an access to enterprise
apps over a network, instead of buying and installing expensive
packages.
Independent Software Vendors (ISV) provide SaaS-based
solutions.
Email, accounting, CRM and HR are few markets where SaaS
has been introduced and become a hit.
SalesForce.com for instance, is a dominant player in the SaaS
market, providing CRM solutions to customers.
Key enterprise business app providers like Oracle and
Microsoft have joined the SaaS bandwagon
A new model called Platform-as-a-Service has sprung up,
similar to SaaS, but for developers
Software as a service :Future trends
SaaS based CRM apps have become successful in the market
There hasnt been a dominant SaaS player in the ERP domain
till date, but with big names like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft
entering the market, we might see some action very soon.
There have been speculations that SAP would be launching
their ERP products based on the SaaS model mainly to attract
the SMBs.
Platform-as-a-Service: Independent development platform
would be provided enabling developers to create and deliver
any kind of business app, entirely on-demand and without
software.
7. Service Oriented Architecture: What
is it
It lets enterprises weave together disparate business
applications such as SCM, ERP or CRM while enabling them to
collaborate each other.
SOA thus becomes an important technology as it solves the
problem of interoperability amongst applications on different
platforms and also provides a way for data aggregation and
collaboration amongst them.
While SOAP-enabled Web Services (XML over HTTP) are the
most common implementation of SoA, Web Services are not
necessarily required to define a SoA. The protocol
independence of SoA means that different consumers can use
services by communicating with the service in different ways.
Service Oriented Architecture: Story
so far
Industry specific Maturity models for SOA
implementation emerged
More applications and development platforms
became SOA compliant.
Microsoft and Sun introduced .NET and Java
specifications for building SOA compliant
applications
BEA was the 1
st
to offer a unified SOA based
platform to integrate business processes,
applications and legacy environments for an
enterprise.
Service Oriented Architecture:
Evolving trends & Future predictions
EAI vendors: These are SOA platform vendors, who provide
development and integration of the business processes for
SOA model based applications. The major market drivers in this
field are IBM, Oracle, BEA and Sun.
Some issues like security concerns around Web Services
compliance, management of services etc remain to be
implemented.
By combining Web 2.0 with SOA, would result in creation of
applications that can be quickly developed and implemented,
and that too at a lower cost with reusability of services.
SOA would combine both the service oriented architecture and
the event driven architecture (EDA) whereby software modules
are related to business components based on events and alerts
rather than the direct calls among them.
8. Unified Threat Management : what is
it
A UTM is a single device that provides protection
against multiple security threats be it viruses, spam,
network and host intrusions, etc. Its available as a
hardware appliance, which can simply be plugged
into the network and configured.
Their simplicity and speed of deployment has made
them extremely popular amongst organizations.
The best use for UTMs is at the branch office level
where you dont have dedicated manpower to
manage security.
Unified Threat Management : Story so
far
Software UTMs started gaining momentum.
Lots of Open source UTMs became available
apart from the commercial appliances.
UTMs became embedded in desktops and
laptops.
UTMs for home users have also become
available.
Apart from security, you can also configure
UTM devices for bandwidth management,
defining policies for a group or individual, etc.
Unified Threat Management: Future
Push technology: With the help of this new technology, updates
from the vendor can be pushed to the UTM device, within a
particular time frame. Presently, a UTM has to pull upgrades
from a central repository which is a disadvantage as the UTM
might miss out on crucial time since a patch has been released.
So this technology helps maintain currency.
Stronger UTMs: As newer threats emerge, performance of
UTMs also needs to stay on par. Packets with larger size need
to be scanned within seconds.
VoIP traffic: Apart from HTTPS and FTP traffic, VoIP traffic
could also be routed through UTMs. Security has been
incorporated for the popular SIP protocol.
SIP: The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signalling protocol
used for establishing sessions in an IP network.
9. Storage: Glimpses 2007
Hard drive capabilities hit the 1 Terabyte mark.
Tiny personal NAS boxes became ubiquitous this
year. New security standards emerged for encrypting
data at rest, like the IEEE1619.3.
Email archival solutions became widespread
USB based flash drive capabilities exceeded 4 GB.
NAS boxes, Information Lifecycle Management,
Continuous data protection
Storage: A peek into future
Storage virtualization will be widespread.
Solid state drives in notebooks will become common place.
SSDs are thinner, lighter, and faster, which should improve
system performance, makes notebooks lighter.
Hard drive capabilities will reach 2 TB+ range for desktops.
Virtual Tape Libraries will become more common.
VTL: It presents a storage component as a tape drive (that
stores computer data on magnetic tape) or library for use with
existing backup software.
Full Disk Encryption or FDE based drives will emerge for
storage security. Performance wont degrade because each
drive will be handling its own encryption.
10. Unified Communications: What is it
Unified Communications (UC) is a commonly used term for the
integration of disparate communications systems, media,
devices and applications, so that you know the best way to
reach the other party.
This potentially includes the integration of fixed and mobile
voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced
business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX ((telephone
switching system within an enterprise), voice messengers, IP
phones, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, text
messaging through IMs, and data sharing through collaboration
tools like interactive whiteboards into a single environment
offering the user a more complete but simpler experience.
PBX: Private branch exchange

Unified Communications: Story so far
SIP has overtaken H.323 to emerge as the
favorite standard in UC devices
Major vendors are offering tools to enable
convergence and tie communications into
business processes
There has been a paradigm shift from VoIP
to CoIP (Communications over IP) which
means loading all kinds of communications
over your IP network.
Unified Communications: The road
ahead
Interoperability amongst UC devices: Ciscos IP telephony,
unified messaging, , mobility and audio conferencing solutions
are more popular while IBM and Microsoft are preferred for
email, instant messaging and web conferencing. Interoperability
amongst them is important.
Similar to SaaS, expect Communications as a Service to pick
up in a big way as companies try to cut down on infrastructure
costs through hosted solutions.
Users would be able to check all types of messages from a
unified e-mail box, web browser or mobile device, anywhere on
the network.
Companies would prefer open standards such as SIP and
SIMPLE to improve on interoperability than H.323, which is still
widely in use amongst major PBX and IP PBXs.
Increasingly IM systems will be integrated into other corporate
back office systems such as ERP, CRM, SFA and SCM.
11. Virtualization Technologies: What it
is
This technology abstracts the hardware from the Software so
that the hardware appears as one large pool of resources to the
others.
There are several kinds of virtualization: server, storage,
application, network, and the latest entrant-desktop
virtualization.
This technology allows multiple Operating systems with their
applications to be installed on top of a single hardware server.
For eg, if a software tester needs a machine with Windows XP,
Visual Studio and Oracle installed onto it, then one can create
such a machine in a virtual environment and provide it to tester.
Virtualization Technologies: Story so
far
Microsoft launched its 1
st
hypervisor in 2007.
IntelVT: Using this technology, a single CPU
physically acts as if several CPUs are working
together, so that the number of guest OSs can be
hosted simultaneously on the host machine with
each virtual CPU dedicated to one guest OS.
Enhanced security for virtual environments becomes
a must.
Virtual tapes are gaining momentum. Data is stored
in hard drives nowadays as compared to being
stored on tapes during previous years.
Virtualization Appliances
With this technology, one can deploy software
solution in just a couple of minutes.
For eg: if you need to deploy a mail server within
your organization, then there are preconfigured
virtual images available, which you just need to
download from the internet for the respective virtual
machines and then finally run them.
This is suited for places where people dont want to
invest time on installation and configuration.
Virtualization Technologies: Where is it
heading?
In the near future the performance of a
virtualized OS or application will be at par
with the performance in the native machine.
Storage virtualization: In this, data is stored
wherever it finds free space rather than
seeking space on a single storage device.
Application virtualization: A particular
application which is not compatible with the
native OS runs such an application within a
virtualized environment created upon native
OS.
12. Web 2.0 : What is it
Web 2.0 can refer to web-based communities and hosted
services such as social-networking sites, wikis, etc. A
layman can post his views in a blog without having to know a
single word of HTML.
Enterprises can leverage the power of Web 2.0 integrating
applications in a web browser, allowing users to modify content
in real time, allowing multiple users to interact, aggregating
content from other sites into your own, hosting desktops on the
web, providing online videos, audioblogging, webinars,
blogging are just few possibilities.
Technologies such as AJAX, Flex, Meshup, Atom, Podcast,
XML, Javascripts, RSS feed, Wiki, P2P and Blog form are the
backbone of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 : The story so far
Sites like Orkut, YouTube, and FlickR made social
networking over the Web a reality.
All major software vendors of Web 2.0 enable their
collaborative solutions.
Enterprises started adding features like blogging,
RSS feeds, and Wiki into their own portals for their
employees.
The concept of Web OSs came into the market,
allowing users to access any operating system
through a web browser.
Web 2.0 : A peek into the future
Semantic Web also termed as Web 3.0 might see its
existence, where computers will be capable of
understanding information and performing tedious
tasks such as finding, sharing, and combining on
web.
Web based calendar application will intelligently
arrange your schedules based on inputs from others
calendars minus any inputs from the user himself.

Web 2.0 : A peek into the future
(contd..)
FM radio station streaming, which will select
contents as Podcast, so as to make your friends
know that your voice was heard on-air when you
requested for a song.
Semantic web developers coming out with a new
XML format.
Mobile 2.0, convergence of technology in mobile
handheld device would make a huge impact.