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2010: what to expect

Cloud computing will continue to gain momentum and it will be make/break time for social computing in the enterprise 2009 saw cloud computing become a buzzword and today it would be hard to find a CIO who isn't aware of the concept and what it can purportedly do for an organization. 2010 will see Indian companies start piloting cloud computing. Private cloud and hybrid models will be more popular in India. What will help this concept take off will be the fact that Indian IT set-ups are already making use of virtualization and modular computing (blades et al) and from there it is just one step to the cloud. Almost all the IT majors have a private cloud offering and the coming year will see deployments happening of these. Cloud appliances, management tools that let you manage public and private cloud infrastructure as one homogenous piece, cloud platforms--all of these will either emerge or mature. 2010 will be the year in which the cloud will go from being a nice-to-have to a must-have.

Social computing had a breakthrough year on the consumer side in 2009. The coming year will determine if it will be equally successful in the enterprise. I'm not referring to companies using Twitter to pass on information about special offers and the like or corporate blogging. What I am talking about is the use of social computing technology to improve collaboration and productivity within the enterprise. A long time ago, Lotus Notes was created as an enterprise collaboration tool before it ended up as a messaging platform. A successful enterprise social computing platform would have to leverage unified communications and presence to create a medium that makes it easy for ideas to propagate and catch fire.

The mobile phone is the computer. Increasingly smartphones offer capabilities that were only found on PCs in the past. In the US, sales of smartphones have grown even while overall mobile phone sales have slipped. In India, smartphones haven't had that kind of success yet. However, it's only a matter of time before they do. The question remains if 2010 will be the year of the mobile computing revolution in India. So far, Indian companies haven't done much in terms of tapping the potential of mobile devices for corporate computing with most mobile-enablement being limited to pushing data to phones via SMS.

Prashant L Rao, Editor
prashant.rao@expressindia.com