It hasn’t been easy to see the future of IT, and preparing this year’s look ahead we found that still to be true. Despite consolidation, innovation keeps bringing new ideas to the fore.Three broad trends will take place over the next 10 years, according to research firm Gartner:
• the evolution of Web 2.0, which includes user-created content, lightweight technology and service-based access;
• “real world Web,” defined as local processing capabilities that interact with their surroundings;
• and the evolution of service-oriented architecture through model-driven and event-driven architectures.
But many new technologies are hyped, making it hard for resellers and their customers to know which to pay attention to.
So we picked six technologies experts suggest keeping an eye on:
3D Printers and 3D Screens
What is it? Printers that can print 3D models and screens that can produce 3D images without glasses.
Which vendors are working on it? Z Corp., Dimension Printing; Holografika, EON Reality.
When expected to mature: Printers: Two years; Screens: 10 years.
Why it’s important: 3D printers resemble inkjet printers, but their heads deposit resin, plastic or another material to build a physical 3D model from data. 3D printers are about to go through a major transformation in terms of applications they can be used for, says Jackie Fenn, vice-president and Gartner fellow with Gartner Research.
Z Corp., for example, has a technique that produces four-colour models of anything that can be created as a 3D data model. “It’s not a production technique, but for one-offs where you’re making a small number of these,” says Fenn. This includes a range of applications, particularly for industrial prototyping and architectural design. Printing services will be created for smaller businesses (since a printer costs around $50,000), and 3D modelling skills will be in high demand. The market will eventually expand to geo-spatial maps and medical applications.
3D screens exist today but are not adopted outside of exhibition or high-end design applications. For the next three to five years it will remain a niche technology, says Fenn, and is a decade away from becoming a consumer-level device. But it has business potential in automotive or aerospace product design, geological exploration for oil and gas, and medical research.
Optical-based Networks and Services
What is it? A reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM).
Which vendors are working on it? Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks.
When expected to mature: 2-3 years.
Why it’s important: Several emerging services will drive bandwidth consumption over the next five years on carrier networks, according to Nick Maynard, senior analyst with the Yankee Group’s Communications Network Infrastructure Decision Service.
These include video services for consumers, Ethernet services for enterprises and wavelength services for wholesale customers. The resulting capacity requirements (25 to 30 Mbps) will push carriers to adopt new optical platforms.
ROADM is not new. What’s new is the appearance of features in purpose-built metro optical gear.
“Everyone is talking about ROADMs,” says Maynard. “They are definitely going to be a part of the network — the question is how big of a part.” Over the next two to three years we’ll see their adoption by major carriers. Some vendors, like Cisco, are coming up with lower-cost ROADMs aimed at enterprise users.
The rise of ROADMs will go hand-in-hand with the push for video services and upgrading networks to support higher levels of data. “Those transitions are taking place at the same time and these ROADMs will come in to support those in the background,” said Maynard. The biggest driver on the business side will be Ethernet services. “It’s been around for a long time but it’s starting to hit that critical mass, it’s starting to trickle down to small and medium enterprises,” he says.
Internet video-on-demand (iVoD) is also expected to grow quickly by 2009, and its streams will be more difficult to predict and plan for than broadband data traffic. ROADM is being considered as a way to resolve this issue.
Modular Data Centres
What is it? A modular, portable data centre in a box.
Which vendor is working on it? Sun Microsystems.
When coming to market: Next year.
Why it’s important: CIOs are crippled by energy and space constraints in their data centres, particularly in the era of Web 2.0. So in late October, Sun unveiled a prototype of a virtualized modular data centre built into a shipping container, dubbed Project Blackbox.
“Power and real estate costs are huge factors in today’s data centres,” says Rob Adley, vice-president of infrastructure solutions at Sun Canada. “Over the long term they’re much more significant than the upfront costs of the hardware.”
A modular data centre packages compute, storage and network infrastructure along with power and cooling into modular units in a shock-absorbing shipping container. Racks in the prototype, which Sun says can be deployed almost anytime, anywhere, can be packed tighter than in a traditional data centre.
Sun is targeting Project Blackbox at large-scale network service deployments such as Web 2.0 build-outs, data centre expansion, emergency response and localized high-performance computing. “There are opportunities around different verticals such as energy, oil and gas,” says Adley. “You could put this out on an oil rig or seismic vessel, you could use it in military deployments, humanitarian situations, disaster recovery.”
SOA on a chip
What is it: Commoditized service-oriented tools and processes on a chip.
Which vendors are working on it? Intel, Cisco.
When coming to market?: At least a few years away.
Why it’s important: Service-oriented architecture is a hot topic and an emerging architecture in its own right, but its future is on a microchip,” says Michael Kuhbock, founder and chairman of the Integration Consortium.
“Each service resides on its own chip, so instead of having these massive server farms you really have a highly distributed network of computing capability executing very specific business logic.” The long-term vision is that SOA will be commoditized and sit on silicon.
“If you talk to the Ciscos and the Intels of the world, that will happen in the relatively near future,” he said.
“How long it takes to transpire, that’s the million dollar question. And if it does, that’s another million dollar question. But Intel and Cisco are betting on it, and a few other organizations believe it will be commoditized.”
Other SOA-related trends Gartner says to look for include event-driven architecture (an architectural style for distributed applications where certain functions are packaged into modular components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more events. It’s still five to 10 years away), and model-driven architecture (a trademark of the Object Management Group, it’s a proposed approach to allow business-level functionality to be