The industry reflects, looks ahead

By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Friday, March 14, 2008 06:39 PM

K. C. Yee, vice president for Asia-Pacific, Serena Software

K. C. Yee,
Serena Software
Given market conditions, IT departments will have to be even more careful when managing their budgets, even though they still need innovative IT to keep ahead of the competition.

Q. What do you remember as the biggest industry news for 2007?
Yee: It has to be the emergence of Facebook, which has been a showcase of how Web 2.0 mentality can breed innovation in unimaginable ways. Facebook started as a simple application designed to let college students keep track of each other. It quickly attracted millions of users and expanded beyond the college scene, connecting people all over the world in a virtual community.

But, Facebook's popularity reached unprecedented levels when earlier this year, they published a public API so that third-party developers could extend the Facebook platform and within days new applications were being created for Facebook. Within months there were thousands of applications, all being used by millions of Facebook subscribers. Next year will be exciting as we see the business community harness that innovation and use it to drive productivity.

Name three hot technologies to watch in 2008.
Three technologies which are poised to change the way we do business in 2008 are Web services based on service-oriented architecture (SOA), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and business mashups.

More companies will move to SOA-based development next year as strong governance frameworks come to the fore, helping to reduce the chaos sometimes associated with SOA adoption. This is supported by the increasing number of SOA-compliant services applications which will deliver the savings and make a reality of the promises of SOA.

In regards to SaaS, to date the market has been dominated by the pure-play on-demand technology firms in addition to the likes of Oracle and Microsoft, but in 2008 other vendors will make giant leaps with their SaaS offerings.

In 2007, Web 2.0 made it possible for millions to create custom Web applications using open APIs and tools from the likes of Facebook and Google. In the same way, business mashups will come to the fore in 2008 as companies look to automate common business activities. In our challenging business environment, business mashups will enable companies and their business users to quickly address their everyday needs, freeing-up scarce IT application development resources to focus on more complex tasks.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
... Keeping up with the fast moving pace of IT innovation and their response time to their end-users. 2008 will be a year that will see the introduction of many new technologies. Therefore, the way that IT departments manage the impact of these technologies on the business is extremely important.

Given market conditions, IT departments will have to be even more careful when managing their budgets, even though they still need innovative IT to keep ahead of the competition. Therefore, managing IT budgets will also be a major challenge. Solutions such as virtualization, business mashups, and strategic outsourcing will allow companies to take advantage of innovation without increasing budgets.

Social networking sites...
... Have reached a new level of popularity over the last year, attracting tens of millions of users. Next year, more social networking sites will emerge, but these sites will be tailored to customers, employees, friends, and fans. For example, Serena had adopted Facebook as its corporate intranet, Nike has started its own social Web site, and even presidential hopefuls have started up their own social networks created for their campaigns.


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