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Technology landscaping is
not an easy process, but an
essential one to make the
right technology strategy
choices for the
IT
Services
organization. It involves
studying the existing
products from various
vendors targeting different
technology spaces, and also
understanding the new trends
that are emerging. At
Synergetics
when making the strategic
plans for technology
adoption across the
organization and services
offered key inputs
considered are:
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Technology landscape -
studying the existing
products from various
vendors targeting
different technology
spaces
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Vendor rhythms – the
technology roadmaps and
evangelism plans of
various software vendors
like
Microsoft,
Sun.
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Market Intelligence –
the demand for a
technology emerging in
the market (Market
research sources) Some
of the sources for this
are sites like
“DirectionsOnMicrosoft”
who provide in-depth
information on the
various
Microsoft
technology roadmaps and
the benefits and
shortcomings of each.
Reports from agencies
like Forrester and
Gartner also provide
invaluable information
on the technology
trends. Like all the
trade gurus are
predicting “Cloud
computing” as
the technology going
ahead in the year
2010-11.
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At
Synergetics
itself we have lot of
market data on demand
for technology, the
upgrade plans for
different organizations.
We engage with our
clients extensively to
collate this information
so that plan for the
required services well
in advance.
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Business Value – working out the business value proposed by each new
technology releasing in
the market. This would
involve studying the
features in the new
technology or new
version and
understanding what
benefits they bring in
terms of improving
developer productivity,
improving the
maintainability of the
application, making the
application more
interoperable with other
technologies, reducing
costs. Comparing the new
technology with existing
technology is critical
to help companies make
the right choice.
Example with
Microsoft SilverLight
hitting the market, a
lot of comparisons were
made with the existing
Flash technology and it
becomes critical to
understand this and
identify the benefits
and limitations.
Based on these various
drivers the technology
strategy for the year 2010
has emerged. Some of the key
technology areas we feel are
going to play a big role
this year and are going to
bring in a lot of business
for software vendors are in
4 key areas – Rich Internet
Applications, Infrastructure
and Collaboration,
Business
Intelligence and
Cloud
computing.
With Web 2.0 what was
introduced and took the web
development world with a
storm are the
AJAX
technologies set. But the
web is in for another
revolution with the
visualizations turning
richer with a lot of
graphics, animation, video
and audio integration. Rich
Internet Applications like
SilverLight
will be key technologies
promoted and used for
creating these feature rich
web sites. Adobe Flash
already dominating the
market in this segment with
wide support for major
browsers it was critical
that
SilverLight
provide a similar rich
development set. Rapidly
growing in versions since
its introduction in 2008
SilverLight
is now in its 4th version
with some really great
features incorporated like
OutOfBrowser support, .NET
runtime support, rich media
support being a few. The
ability to code using .NET
framework and languages like
C# and VB.NET has helped the
adoption of this technology
as organizers can leverage
on the skills of their
existing .NET developers for
creating
SilverLight
applications rather than
getting them to upgrade to
Flash. To be able to capture
the Flash market space
SilverLight
technologies yet have a long
way to go but with the speed
at which Microsoft is
building on the feature set
it is a technology space to
watch out for.
Social media application is
another space which is
growing and invading even
other application areas like
collaboration. New versions
of products like
SharePoint 2010
provide rich out-of-box
features for social
computing, networking and
collaboration. Along with
these it also provides great
integration points for
creating composite
applications through
features like Business
Connectivity Services, with
data coming in from
different back-end
applications like SAP, CRM.
SharePoint has matured from
being merely a collaboration
tool in its first version to
being a Business
Collaboration Platform for
the Enterprise and the Web
with key focus areas like ECM, Document management,
Composites, Insights. The
integration of Performance
Point Server with
SharePoint 2010
has made
SharePoint 2010
also a great platform for
creating and publishing
business critical
dashboards.
This brings us to another
technology space which has
been simply gaining in
importance and soon
penetrating all areas of
software applications –
Business Intelligence. For
any business to survive and
thrive it is important to
gain insights into the key
performance areas and study
the trends. Products like
SQL
Server 2008 BI
platform, Cognos,
Informatica provide the
necessary tools for
analyzing the business data,
studying the trends,
monitoring the KPI. This is
one technology space where
we see a rise in demand and
a great business potential.
Lastly in the world of
software where it is
becoming difficult to manage
large data centers and
deployments of application
clusters we see
Cloud computing
as one of the areas where
there will be a lot of
activity and focus.
Cost Effective:
Cloud computing
brings in a lot of benefits
to a business in terms of:
Scalability: Ability to
scale the application
deployment according to the
requirements and demands. In
self hosted scenarios, the
infrastructure set-up should
be targeted at what is
required to meet the demands
of the application during
peak usage, while the rest
of the time this
infrastructure may be
unused.
Cost Effective and Flexible:
Cloud computing
allows businesses to expand
or contract computing power
as required and allows
‘bursts’ of computing power
to be utilized on an
on-demand basis. This “Pay
as you Use” functionality
helps in reducing the
infrastructure costs of an
organization if they had
hosted the application on
premise. Virtualization has
enabled organizations to
increase the utilization of
the server environment,
cloud computing takes this
step further by taking over
the management of server
utilization thus reducing
‘wasted’ compute power. It
also allows very effective
load balancing.
Resilience: One big
advantage that all types of
Cloud computing
offer is that, by nature,
Cloud computing
removes single points of
failure. The failure of one
node of the system has no
impact on Information
Availability and does not
result in perceivable
downtime. Cloud computing
provides a highly resilient
computing environment.
But along with these
benefits
Cloud computing
also brings in its own
challenges:
Standardization: The
cloud providers today do not
have a standard for
providing the different
cloud services. Each one has
their own set of API’s
provided for creating
applications to be deployed
on the cloud. Proprietary
standards for data storage,
computing on the cloud mean
that migrating applications
from one cloud provider to
another would become
difficult.
Security: The lowered
cost of cloud services,
along with the flexibility
and scalability of
deployment it offers is
highly desirable to
enterprises but one
challenge that enterprises
have to deal with is giving
control of data to the cloud
providers. Data security is
a major challenge with
hosting applications on the
cloud. The data is
vulnerable to intrusive
attacks and the kind of
security features provided
by the cloud provider become
critical.
Internet bandwidth:
The public cloud is
delivered via the Internet’s
network and therefore is
vulnerable should this
become unavailable.
Bandwidth is not unlimited
and public cloud computing
users may find difficulties
with processing speeds at
periods of peak demand. |
