Patrick Chan, chief technology advisor, Asia-Pacific emerging technologies research, IDC Asia-Pacific.
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| The recession at this point is expected to prompt users to rethink existing operations and to go back to the drawing board to start considering new alternatives. | ||
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Q: What technology innovation or product are you looking forward to next year?
I will be looking forward to products and services involving:
- Virtualization of IT workloads. Virtualization technologies alongside cloud service offerings will be an interesting change agent for user organizations. Management of virtualized and physical IT assets are going to strain IT departments. OS, application and desktop virtualization offerings will increase and align with corporate IT best practices. Standardization of IT services, data center consolidation and refresh efforts will continue.
- Location-based services. There is lots of room to enrich existing mobile services with location-based context, for example digital overlaying of 3D information, contextual retail service offerings and guides, to name some.
- More human-friendly and touch interfacing technologies. The iPhone phenomenon is spreading like wild fire in the touch arena, and from cameras, mobile phones, TVs and even to coffee tabletops, we are going to see more such innovations.
- Power-aware devices and programming. More devices and services will emerge to be power-aware to optimize operations for energy usage. I am looking forward to holistic offerings from hardware and software vendors to make this a reality.
- Collaborative services coming to mobile platforms and software products. IDC is looking forward to a faster growing ecosystem of support services to improve massive user collaborations.
Was there a technology release which failed to live up to its hype and disappointed you this year?
There are several:
- Flexible display e-book readers are again disappointments in their alignment to standards, which are also badly needed.
- Laptop batteries sill lack innovation and the market badly needs a lift from the existing two to three hours usage.
- ITIL v3 adoption is still fairly low for users in the Asia-Pacific region. More education and vendor support in product offerings is needed to help change this.
- Virtual worlds and their alignment to real world corporate environments have gone through a lot of hype, but adoption remains low.
- Grid computing--more effort is needed to educate companies in exploring new ways of doing business. Currently, adoption in the region is still niche and a tedious process.
- Ubiquitous computing is improving but still needs alignment in products and infrastructure support from governments and vendors. It remains a very segmented market, with the need for standards and support from the ecosystem to improve usage in the region.
What are some challenges which IT departments will face this year, and will there be any new challenges?
IT departments will be facing a closer check on budgets and to keep the lights on with small relative changes to the IT budget.
At the same time, there will be a growing need to focus on improving business profits with IT. New challenges will include leveraging emerging technologies like virtualization, cloud services and phasing them into existing operations to trim operational cost and to incrementally create differentiation to business services.
However, we are still seeing healthy investments in IT as organizations seek to explore new technology approaches to trim cost and maintain quality of service. The overarching industry trend is about the IT industry's ongoing and massive transformation--toward emerging markets, SMB and consumer customer segments, and toward the Internet and cloud, mobile, sustainable, community-developed and solutions-packaged technologies.
The recession at this point is expected to prompt users to rethink existing operations and to go back to the drawing board to start considering new alternatives. The jury is still out on how users will be embarking on their IT journeys.
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