InfoQ – The beginning of the year is often conducive to formulating predictions about the most significant trends to expect in the coming year. Along with a discussion about programming languages predictions that took place on Lambda the Ultimate, a number of other posts popped up trying to outline trends for IT industry, web and enterprise software development.
Samuel Greengard tried back in November 2008 to outline what technologies he expects to help companies improving efficiency and effectiveness in challenging crisis times of 2009. Many of these trends are closely linked to the expansion of Web, and of Web 2.0 in particular:
Expansion of SaaS beyond traditional business applications due, for instance to cloud computing;
Increasing mobility thanks to wireless technology;
Virtualization and portability of data to support mobility but also to cut storage costs;
Social networking on top of Web 2.0 tools that “has become a way […] to leverage enterprise knowledge, customer-based business intelligence and more”;
Web and video collaboration that are expected to be adopted by a majority of companies by the end of 2010.
Even though Greengard also mentions some trends that are less directly related to Web, i.e. security, risk and compliance issue, document management and e-discovery as well as project management concerns, he highlights that we are moving towards “an increasingly Web-centric [and connectivity dependent] computing model” since Web 2.0 provides tools “making it easier to manage data, tasks and business processes” and “further enabling mobility and more seamless access to pertinent information”.
