Five technology trends to watch in 2010

Technology innovation continued its ruthless pace in 2009, despite the economic headwinds. Now it’s time to turn our sights on 2010, where there are going to be some really interesting things to keep an eye on. Let’s count down the five tech trends that should be on your radar for 2010.

5: The consumerization of IT

This is something we’ve been talking about for a couple years but the trend is accelerating. We see it in employees using their own personal laptops and devices for work tasks and using freely available Web tools to help them get their jobs done. This can create a whole host of problems for IT, but in most cases you don’t want to squash it altogether. What you’ll need is a policy that gives employees guidance on how and when these types of tools can and can’t be used, and why.

4: Desktop virtualization

TechRepublic recently asked its CIO Jury about desktop virtualization and 75% said they weren’t interested. However, the 25% that ARE interested are very enthusiastic about using it to cut costs and simplify IT support. In 2010, it’s going to interesting to see if this trend gains momentum and becomes more mainstream, or if it’s simply relegated to a few niche scenarios and industries.

3: E-readers

While most of the buzz around e-readers is centered around consumers readings books and newspapers, there are also a new set of e-readers that will hit the market in 2010 that are aimed at helping businesses streamline the meetings that require huge stacks of paper and bring more multimedia capabilities to business documents. For more ammunition on why you should follow this trend, see Jack Wallen’s article “10 reasons why e-readers make sense in the enterprise.”

2: WAN acceleration

I consider WAN acceleration to be one of the best kept secrets in the IT and business worlds. By caching big files and often-used documents, WAN acceleration appliances and software can save big money on bandwidth costs and give your branch offices and remote workers far better performance on their business applications. Companies like Riverbed are even taking WAN acceleration a step further and using it to help speed up hosted cloud applications by partnering with major SaaS providers. All of this makes WAN acceleration one of the hottest projects in IT right now, because it can offer fast ROI and immediate productivity benefits.

1: Berries, apples, and robots

What do these three things have in common? Well, of course, we’re talking about smartphones with BlackBerry, Apple iPhone, and Google Android. These are the three smartphone platforms that have the most momentum heading into 2010. With smartphones becoming standard tools for more and more business workers, it’s going to be important to watch which devices users gravitate toward, which platforms offer IT more security and manageability features, and which ones developers latch on to as the best place to build new applications for business users

Microsoft computing to attack global problems

New Microsoft initiative will use computing to attack global problems like volcanoes and oil spills

On Monday, Microsoft announced a new focus on high-end distributed computing to help solve global problems and serve as a testbed for Microsoft’s cloud OS.

The program is called the Technical Computing initiative and it was announced via email from Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft’s server group.

Muglia stated:

“Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland.”

Then Muglia explained that the big leaps forwards in computing power in recent years are making new types of scientific analysis possible:

“Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries…

The challenge is that existing software tools are not optimized to harness today’s computing power and data-intensive analytics software is too complex. As a result, Microsoft is making a pledge to invest in a few strategic areas to help change the equation. Here are the three areas, with quotes from Muglia about each:

1. Technical computing to the cloud: “This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly.”
2. Simplify parallel development: “Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and troubleshoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today’s modern computers”
3. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications:“Scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models… Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration.”

The end game here was also summed up by Muglia:

“One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop.”

In terms of how Microsoft is organizing to accomplish these three goals, CNET’s Ina Fried reported: “The effort, which has been quietly coming together over the past 18 months, includes a team of about 500 dedicated staff along with several hundred more from other product teams at the company. The unit will be jointly run by two Microsoft general managers–[Bill] Hilf and Kyril Faenov–and will be responsible for the high-performance computing version of Windows as well as the new efforts.”

Sanity check

I tip my hat to Microsoft for using its powers for good. The stuff that they are talking about with TCT involves changing high-end computing to make it simpler for scientists and engineers to access computing power and apps they need in a much faster, more powerful way in order to solve big problems.

However, keep in mind that what Microsoft is doing is attempting to co-opt the cloud and create a new high-end platform, based on Microsoft technologies such as Azure. In essence, Microsoft is using this as a testbed for making its technologies part of the foundation of the cloud.

That could be a good thing, if Microsoft helps connect the dots and gives developers better tools for this new world of high-end computing (which is mostly dominated by Linux right now), but we should also keep a close eye on Microsoft to make sure it doesn’t build it in such a way that it ultimately serves Microsoft more than the researchers