2010 Predictions: How’d I Do?

My partner in crime Stephen looked back at how he did with his predictions for last year, so I thought I better do the same.

Ubiquitous analytics. In 2010 business intelligence will become less about the power user, and more about democratised access to the ad hoc query. In memory databases will underpin the trend. I think I can safely say this one was a fail. On the other hand, I don’t feel bad, because as Stephen says:

Consider that RedMonk, a four person analyst shop, has the technical wherewithal to attack datasets ranging from gigabytes to terabytes in size. Unless you’re making institutional money, budgets historically have not permitted this. The tools of Big Data have never been more accessible than they are today.

Location, location, location: the new frontier in app dev is location-aware applications and services, for internal, asset and service management, and B2C.

This is a win. IBM may not have acquired ESRI yet, but location is certainly hot. Foursquare went big in 2010, driving the notion of a "check in". Location is making more and more sense in mobile. One area Android pounds Apple into the dust is maps and location-based services. I called it a frontier, and I think I was right. Folks like my client Actuate now support maps natively in their reporting platform.

 

Which underpins a new wave of mobile services as smart phones become pervasive. Augmented Reality will begin to make a mark in the mobile space. Initial experiences in Europe are likely to be in augmented tourism next summer – where you point your phone at a building and it shows you the associated wikipedia entry.

While AR didn’t break out in the summer of 2010 as I expected, it is becoming really interesting. See this post for some great examples. While the Word Lens demo didn’t work in the office when we tried it, it did for others, and this video will blow you away:

Greener business processes through deeper instrumentation, more effective automation and orchestration. Smart Grids, LessWater, LessCoal etc. Resource footprint reduction will be a megatrend from here on in. See IBM’s Smarter Planet.

Another win. While green in general has been a recessionary bust – (in sustainability flat is the new growth) IBM blew the doors off in large scale public sector projects predicated on more sustainable outcomes through systems thinking. IBM’s share price hit $140 a share, the highest its been since its IPO in 1915. And lets not forget Walmart’s world historical announcements of a zero deforestation strategy in Palm Oil use and food traceabilty across the supply chain. We can expect suppliers everywhere to fall in line over the next couple of years. Well done the Waltons.

 

Google will significantly ramp up enterprise efforts – notably in sales, but also ecosystem partnerships with the likes of Deloitte and the other Big SIs.

Google certainly ramped up in the enterprise – going to war with Microsoft on collaboration, in the market and the courts. On the SI side, not as much as you’d expect though. Come on Google- you can’t sell to the enterprise without consultants in the room 😉

 

Hybrid Cloud and On Premise models for the enterprise. Hybrid is now just the reality of how we get things done. Just as open source began as a fringe activity, but captured the mainstream, so SaaS and Cloud are increasingly just an economic and technical reality. Cloud doesn’t replace on premise, it augments it.

I called this perfectly.

 

That said, the Big Cloud Backlash will be in full effect in 2010, after all the hype in 2009.

Nope – 2010 was yet more hype. Backlash for this year?

SOA without the SOA. The hard work done by Oracle, SAP and others will begin to bear fruit. Not in terms of the acronyms loved by Architecture Astronauts such as XML Web Services, WSDL, UDDI and other acronyms – but the componentisation of application suites into more modular services makes them far more amenable to web-based integration.

This happened, if quietly. Check out how AMEE integrates with SAP using Mulesource.

A big upswing in enterprise demerger activity…. notably in financial services. See today’s EU-led banking announcements, for example. Financial services companies that took major state bailouts are going to be split up. The Great Unbundling offers significant opportunities, but also threats, for technology providers.

Remind me to stick to tech predictions. Public anger never forced the issue, and politicians globally totally caved – failing to take advantage of the crisis. So Too Big to Fail is still Too Big To Fail, and Goldman Sachs is using publicly supporter bankers rates to fund speculative bubbles in Facebook. Plus ca change.

So all in all I did OK I think. As is ever the case with RedMonk, we tend to be a little ahead of the market. Next week come my predictions for 2011, some of which will be repeated 😉