(Editor’s note: Dave Kellogg is CEO of Mark Logic, an information infrastructure software company. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)
Given the tumultuous events of 2009, it’s easy to forget the world didn’t come to a standstill. Life continued and Silicon Valley kept innovating.
2010 hopefully won’t be as tumultuous, but should be exciting. Here are my predictions on eight trends that will surface next year:
Corporations will deploy technology for advantage, not cost: As the economy recovers, organizations will – for the first time in nearly a decade – look to information technology as a means of gaining competitive advantage as opposed to a means for simply reducing cost.
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Social networking will divide: People will settle into a pattern of using different social networking platforms for different purposes.
The notion of a single social graph for work, personal and other activities separated only by the friend-type of the linkages is dead. Facebook, assuming it doesn’t continue to make heavy-handed privacy mistakes, will end up owning the friends category. LinkedIn will own business colleagues, but will have to share status-ing with Twitter. Boutique networks should own other activities, perhaps with Ning as the underlying platform across those networks where users don’t mind and/or desire a common profile.
But social network fatigue will set in: While teens will continue to use social networks as telephones, social networking amongst the middle-aged and working crowd will lose some of its luster. Despite Facebook succeeding where Classmates failed, the novelty of reconnecting with long-lost high school friends will fade as will the “I’m at Safeway in the meat department” status message.
In some ways, social networks shouls settle back more into the Plaxo vision of permanently connected address books than the hipper vision of a constant communication platform. Twitter will suffer also – and not just from the “Iranian Cyber Army.”
Cloud computing hype will peak: Passing Gartner’s “peak of inflated expectations,” Cloud Computing will begin to dive into the “trough of disillusionment.”
The types of cloud (e.g, public, private, virtual private) will begin to stabilize as will the number of as-a-service acronyms.
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Strategic cloud consultancies like Appiro and cloud interconnection companies like CastIron should begin to clean up as pragmatic customers seek to define sensible cloud strategies that leverage the best of many options and combine them.
The database market siege will build: The attack against the once-sleepy $15B market controlled by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft will continue to build. While Oracle will reluctantly honor its MySQL promises for the European Union, Postgres will gain momentum among those worried about MySQL’s mid-term future.
Specialist database systems from vendors like Aster Data, Mark Logic, and Streambase will continue to eat the edges of the market while new database-as-a-service cloud offerings will commoditize the core.
The NoSQL movement will continue to gather steam, leveraging Hadoop as an “un-database” for those frustrated with either classic relational database technology or high oligopolistic pricing practices.
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Google will show signs of weakness in search: As spammers gain ground in the cat-and-mouse game of search engine optimization, it will continue to get harder and harder to, for example, find a dishwasher on Google.
With substantial investment, some impressive technology and a good deal of persistence, Microsoft will do some damage to Google with Bing.
While Google is a long way from death by-a-thousand-cuts, the first hundred cuts or so will come from Bing, “decision engines” (such as machine-learning upstart Hunch) and human-powered “answer engines” like Mahalo or Answerville from Amazon.
The XML silent revolution will continue: Without a shot fired, XML may well take over as the principal underlying file format both within the enterprise and across the Internet.
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As the latest suites from Microsoft, Adobe and others continue to penetrate the market, more and more information will, often unknowingly, be stored in an XML format.
New industry standards such as XBRL for financial reporting and HL7 for health records are driving the need for information infrastructures that mange both traditional data and this reservoir of XML-based unstructured content.
Disclosure: Yes, this is good for my company, but the dynamic opens the door to a range of tools and services to help companies extract greater value from data.
Mobility will take off – further: With the combination of new devices, higher-speed mobile networks and new location-aware technology, mobile applications will continue their ascent next year.
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Augmented reality will go mainstream by combining the camera, the screen and the GPS into the devices, turning one’s mobile phone into not only a communication and web surfing device but also a “head’s up display” to guide you through life.
Regardless of how these 2010 predictions play out we know one thing is certain: The tech industry will always bring challenges to the status quo.
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