Gartner Trends @ ITxpo

Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt says Google isn’t trying to make money, they’re trying to change the world. And so goes the interview where he lays out his thoughts on various aspects of their business.

On application innovation: “We’re not trying to design the future. We’re inventing it along the way.”

On their competition: ”We’re not focusing on our competitors. We’re focusing on the future and what our customers like.”

On the enterprise vs. the consumer: “We don’t see the enterprise as a necessarily differerent business from the consumer business. We see consumers wanting similar things in their personal and work life and the technologies are not separate anymore. However, if we offered our enterprise applications for free, that would be too disruptive. So, We decided to build our enterprise model with a new lower price point with very high levels of service.”

On Chrome OS:  “Chrome OS will be free and it will drive down pc costs even more.” They’re going to start with netbooks. A netbook with Chrome OS will be available at some point in 2010. It will not come with a hard drive. Everything will be stored external to the device, but there will be local caching. That way you can do work when you’re off the Internet.

On their niche: “We’re trying to solve the broadest problems with the broadest flexibility. That’s our niche. We build our apps for 100 million people.” 

On their plan:  “All of our services are being hardened. We’re building for robustness, efficiency, and scale. We’re really building a whole new computational platform.”

Gartner Mastermind Interview with Joseph Eng:  Eng is Executive Vice President of Systems and Technology at JetBlue Airlines. JetBlue is rolling out a new state-of-the-art airline terminal, dubbed “T5″, at New York’s JFK airport in just a few weeks. The customer experience is at the forefront of their mission and this terminal. Free Wi-Fi, significantly more security lanes, and easy road access are a few of the highlights of this facility. JetBlue is also testing Wi-Fi in planes and expects this to be the norm in 2009. Technology to the plane seats and electronic payments and transactions (hear no cash needed) within the plane are just a few more of the tech features customers will enjoy.

A new easy-to-use website, high-tech kiosks, electronic transactions, and improved information gathering about passengers’ needs and expectations offer better customer tracking and information gathering, which will drive real-time decisions by JetBlue management. Customer experience, cost efficiency, and keeping the planes on time are all driven by IT. Aligning IT to the business, having a strong governance process, and making solid business cases for new projects are all necessary to enable IT to support the mission of the organization.

TAGS:  Gartner, JetBlue,  Airline Technology, IT Trends,

Billions of dollars are spent each year by these major technology firms. Executives from each of the the R&D groups spoke about some of the new technlogies that are being explored.

Rich Friedrich of HP talked location-based services and context-aware services. Their work on the blending of virtual and actual worlds in location-based services has evolved into Mediascape. Context-aware and sensor-based services resulted in a program called CeNSE: The Central Nervous System for the Earth where one trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators will need the equvalent of 1000 Internets to collect data. They’re working with other large global companies like BP, Brinks, and others to use the data those companies are already collecting as part of their primary business.

David Douglas of Sun discussed improvements in microprocessors beyond what we’re seing now. He talked about “proximity communications” – a capacitor that has charger/amplifiers that connect two silicon chips by putting them in close proximity to each other with a special connector enabling them to work together doubling the power.

Guido Jouret of Cisco talked about their “Health Presence Pods” which enables a patient at a remote location to be diagnosed by a doctor in another location. The pod has various types of technology like an oversize screen, privacy, and medical devices like a heart monitor, blood pressure machine, stethoscope, etc. Cisco has deployed these within their company with great success. Their staff say that the privacy and functionality makes it feel like the doctor is right there with you. Other uses of these “presence pods” could be legal depositions from a distance, interviews with prisoners (who otherwise would be very costly to transport), and others.

Steve Hoover of Xerox showed examples of reusable paper. In the same way that eye glasses can be treated to turn into sunglasses when they are exposed to UV rays of the sun, paper can be treated and then printed on with UVLED printers, or written on with UVLED pens. The paper can then be used over and over hundreds of times without waste. Paper cost may end up being 3 times the cost of normal paper, but with its reusability, it will more than make up for the additional cost. He also talked about a digital mailroom where paper mail is scanned and distibuted digitally with meta data captured making e-discovery and other access much more efficient.

One last piece of parting advice from Guido Jouret of Cisco was this:

“Implement social networking and collaboration within the enterprise, and use video in all its forms for everything.”

One of my favorite sessions at Gartner is the discussion on the top 10 disruptive technologies. In determining which technologies make the list of most disruptive, the research analysts are looking at how high the degree of impact will be, how broad the degree of impact will be, and the timing of the impact. I believe there may be a two more factors in their analysis, but they neglected to mention them in the session. I’ll do a bit more digging to find them. Based on their analysis, the following list was determined:

Top 10 Disruptive Technologies:

1. Multicore and Hybrids – implications on operating systems, software, software speeds, operational impact, and so much more.
2. Social Networks and Social Software – links, discussions, comments, ratings, bookmarks, tags, friends lists, refinements, references, rich user profiles, etc.
3. User Interface – organic light-emitting diode displays, digital paper and billboards, holographic and 3D, VRML to X3D, virtual keyboards, smart fabric, gesture recognition, etc.
4. Cloud Computing and Cloud/Web Platforms – a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are provided “as a service” across the Internet to multiple external customers.
5. Web Mashups – Will change the way users consume services and the way companies provide them. See Gartner prediction in earlier post below.
6. Ubiquitous Computing – We’ve gone from thousands of people per computer in the 1960s, and we’re heading toward thouands of computers per person in th future.
7. Contextual Computing – WYNIWYG – Gartner Predicts:  By 2012, context-enriched serviceswill impact a $215 billion/year B2C opportunity.
8. Augmented Reality – overlaying informaiton onto our real world
9. Semantic Technologies (7-10 years out at least) – moving intelligence from applications to data – having richer metadata about information that’s already there.
10. Virtualization – beyond consolidation – DR and BizCon – Software distribution.

What now?  CIOs, enterprise architects, and software developers should…

Today:

• Esablish a formal mechanism to identify, analye and plan for potentially disruptive technologies.
• Develop a strategy for social networking inside and outside the enterprise in partnership with sales, marketing, HR, digital natives, and other folks who have a stake in building communities of interest.

Near Future (next 12 months):

• Demand that your technology providers explain how clou computing will affect their offering and pricing strategies.
• Establish enlightened policies for employee activity in public social networks.
• Position to take advantage of the disruptive potential of virualization.

Longer Term:

• Begin bringing in the islands of semantics and context together in a federated standards-based framework.

TAGS: Disruption Technology, Emerging Trends

3D printers are becoming more available, though only a few new business are beginning to use them. Z Corp is a corporation trying to leverage this new technology for 3D modeling. Architectural models seem to be an easy target for this type of output. Check out the Z Corp video that explains the process. I actually got to see and touch some of the output from the 3D printing devices. If felt like a sand mold, and it was hard to believe that human hands did not touch the model in any way, and the output was from one pass of the printer. Check these out:

TAGS: 3D Printers, Emerging Trends