a Look To The Future

While we did a lot of reminiscing, we also felt it was important to look forward. As part of the project, I spoke with some of the leading strategists at manufacturers' organizations to see where they expected the market to be in the next five to 10 years and what opportunities there would be for you.

The overall theme was that technology still needs to be simpler to understand, and it is the job of vendors and VARs to reduce the complexity. Much like today, when most businesses, regardless of size, hire a lawyer or an accountant to handle highly specialized business functions, VARs will handle IT infrastructure and make it seamless for the customer. VARs are already doing this, but it will become ubiquitous in the future.

In terms of technologies, two areas mentioned time and again were Web services and grid computing. The promise of marrying these two technologies will finally make distributed computing a reality. Now, for all you naysayers who argue, "I've been hearing about distributed computing for the past 25 years," I thought the exact same thing. Why now? The answer, say these futurists, is the Internet.

With the Web, we have established a secure global network upon which applications and Web services can be built. With grid computing, the underlying philosophy is much like electricity and a power grid. Users can plug into computing power on the Web and, rather than use the power of one supercomputer, can tap into a cluster of smaller computers that collectively are more powerful. Like the Internet, this research has been developed in academia and research labs and could be commercialized within the next five years. Vendors are working together on standards, and businesses have begun pilot projects to assess the potential. Meanwhile, an Open Grid Services Infrastructure working group has been formed to develop toolkits and standards for Web services on top of the grid platform.

Will grid and Web services be a reality or still merely a concept on our silver anniversary? It's still unclear, but I'd keep on top of the burgeoning technology just in case it turns out to be as big as the Internet.

What do you see in your crystal ball? Let me know via e-mail at [email protected].