Cutter on 2009 IT Trends

The Cutter Consortium blog has an interesting post titled “IT Trends and Antitrends for 2009“.   Some interesting items listed…I’ve reproduced the listing of Trends and Anti-Trends below with a brief discussion following.

The Trends:

Trend 1: Firms will try to remove redundant islands of business process and technology.
Trend 2: Data warehouses, vocabularies and ontologies will advance steadily in the health sciences.
Trend 3: Open source will get a second chance to get a toe in the door.
Trend 4: Cloud computing will secure more early adopters and virtualization will steadily grow.
Trend 5: Low-cost disk arrays will grow rapidly.

I think these trends are pretty good.

I see Trend 3 (Open Source software) being something that just might take hold in 2009 due to budgetary constraints.  Organizations are seriously under-funded and taking the ‘do more with less’ approach and utilizing Open Source will help.  I’ve found a few organizations that have already started looking at open source systems and applications as a way to operate leaner and cheaper.

The Anti-Trends:

Anti-trend 1: Social networking will unravel.
Anti-trend 2: Mashups will get peeled back.
Anti-trend 3: Large-scale VoIP and unified communication implementations will be muted.
Anti-trend 4: Analytics and BI will lose luster.
Anti-trend 5: Aged infrastructure will stay in service longer.

Again…I would agree with all of these except for Anti-Trend 4. I think Analytics will stick around, especially with the need to save money and ‘do more with less’.  Analytics will help organizations target their offerings to a much narrower client base (thereby saving money on marketing, customer acquisition costs, etc).

A short comment about Anti-trend 1: I do believe Social Networking will start to lose some of its luster, especially within the enterprise.   Organizations have barely figured out how to use blogs…taking on other social aspects will be too much for most businesses, especially with cost cutting.

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