Star Wars
Overview
A beneficial economic climate enables R&D investment and encourages emergent innovation. Enterprise IT corporations are mainly headquartered in the northern hemisphere (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc.) but this will shift to the BRIC countries. In time, the economic climate will transform into a global collaborative economy where the BRIC countries will emerge to become main protagonists. Within two to three years the emerging Cloud computing phenomenon will affect enterprise IT software in a myriad of unthinkable ways. Legacy is a major problem in organizations that employ enterprise IT. Cloud computing and Model driven development will be employed to counteract asphyxiating legacy.
Implications
In this situation, Enterprise IT world will experience a radical shift in its overall innovation. Some of the noticable trends will mostly related to increasing human-computer interaction (HCI), semantic web, and model driven development(MDD). The whole world economic situation will however not change that much, compared with the ICT innovations. Western nations power will still be very influential in predicting the direction of worldwide economies and technological trends. Emerging market nations will thus still follow and be dependable on them. All this factors will lead the Western worlds to be more creative, more efficient in ways of working, cutting cost here and there, pursuing a more sustainable environment-friendly development everywhere. These will also effect the whole regulations and standards with the worlwide Enterprise IT industry, driving a more requirements and public needs for sustainable IT development as well.
Time Frame
1. 2 Years (2009-2010)
The discussion of the semantic web will increase during these years, forcing Google and other search engines to follow this trend. Customers will demand more and more creative search, effective, and ‘smart’ internet that will be more personalized and customized towards their needs. This will further push semantic web development, W3C and other consortium to speed up standards and regulations in this corner. As world economy starts to heal, this will stimulate even further outsourcing trends in the emerging markets. BRIC economies are becoming more mature and showing signs of rapid development in Enterprise IT.
2. 5 Years (2011-2015)
Worldwide economy will start to flourish again, making it possible for the Western world to put more attention to sustainable development in the IT industry. IT will focus more in providing and enabling Green energy solutions for the enterprises. Collective Collaboration software will become more popular as it stimulates group knowledge sharing. BRIC countries will be also effected by this, as knowledge gap is decreasing. Large numbers of skilled workers will start to flow entering the aging Europe, making sure that technology worksforce stay balanced and Western will stay at the tip of the innovation.
Development in semantic web will continue further. Model-driven development (MDD) will also start to take off as one of the main topics in software development. This will enable developers and corporations to gain efficiency and reduce operating costs by becoming more model-driven. Enterprise IT will be aimed to support more high data volumes, provide highly reliable and predictable platforms and create truly adaptive and integrated organizations.
3. 10 Years (2016-2026)
During this period, pace of innovation will stay become rapid. Western nations will keep on domination overall technology developments in the IT sector. By this period, only a small number of media are still in their traditional form, all other will be digitalized. Computing and media are completely converged. Fierce competition from emerging markets will require western corporations to even more realize stronger brand awareness and customer loyalty to compete with the emerging markets.
Sustainable developments will drive IT development further in new sectors, such as biotechnology, which are still in its infancy in the emerging markets. Artificial Intelligence and Brain Computing will start to become a new developing trend in the market, that will drive ubiquitous communication to become even more popular and reliable. Augmented reality will penetrate even further in the established Western societies, which will be seen more as a lifestyle rather than a technology. Based on these facts, corporations and enterprises to look for more of their applications in the whole value-added chain activities (e.g. manufacturing, production, and logistics).