New products and services will help lift the economy, once ROI is determined.
2010. There you go. Since the rest of the punditry world has
taken to guessing when the current economic meltdown will solidify, and
businessincluding the high-tech businesswill get back on track, I figured I
should join the guessing game also. Lets make it September 2010, to be more
exact.
Heres my reasoning, with a special high-tech twist.
Banking technology systems arent really looking very
intelligent right now. How many news stories start out with the statement that
banks and financial institutions are unable to even figure out their losses and
debt exposure?
It will be a year at least before banks figure out where the
bodies are buried. Add to this the difficulty of melding transaction systems as
bank acquisition gains further speed, and I dont see the financial industry
able to get the growth engine going until 2010.
So, that is the bad news. What are the reasons to think that
high tech and the rest of the world economy will start to gain traction by
2010? The answer is new products, new services and new technologies that are now
available or just coming around the bend.
In the hardware area, you are starting to see the availability
of cost-efficient and easy-to-deploy data centers. With solutions such as data
centers in a shipping container or a more conventional rack system that can
replace your current energy hog, tech executives will be able to create an ROI
that even a financial officer can love.
On the other side of the hardware equation are mobile devices
and ubiquitous wireless networks that will allow companies to easily distribute
their work force and sales force.
Many of these products are here now, but companies will need a
year of working out those ROI equations and testing prototypes before making a
cash commitment.
On the software side, much of the discussion is about clouds
and virtualized computing environments. However, even more than hardware, big
software bets take time.
Customers want to feel that their answers about security,
ownership of corporate information and protection of customer data are
exhaustively answered before they consider letting a cloud replace their old,
but reliable data infrastructure. Those customers want to talk to early
adopters, train their developers and deploy a piece of a cloud before going all
the way.
Outside of the traditional software and hardware industries, I
think 2010 will also be a robust period of new technology introduction. Much of
the U.S. and world economy continues to be driven by the automotive industry,
and by 2010 we should start seeing automobiles that are fuel-efficient, priced
to sell and appealing in designall factors currently missing from the auto
lineup.
Also, all that investment that Silicon Valley has been directing
toward new technologymuch of it greenshould be translated to products coming
on the market in, you guessed it, 2010.
So there you have itmy guess for when the current mess will be
a historical memory like the dot-com bubble is. Mark it on your calendar. And,
if I am proven wrong in September 2010, Ill be happy to give you a new date.
Editor
at Large Eric Lundquist can be reached at elundquist@eweek.com.
IT Infrastructure 
