Not all predictions and prophecies are long-term: after all, I have to give someone the opportunity to refute what I say.
If the topic is 'IT', then, it will be even easier to prove me wrong given the extreme 'elasticity' of certain situations. Yet some trends in my opinion are traced, and I am pleased to arrange them here for future reference. Here are 3 IT trends for the coming year:
1. The Cloud will be the new hardware. – All the great industrial changes have been driven by new platforms, from the advent of the typewriter to that of the PC, from the advent of the client-server to the Internet. Today the entire infrastructure can be 'virtualized' and controlled centrally through web oriented software. All sorts of systems will be included in the cloud. And for the following years? I don't know, get ready for a Windows Cloud.
2. Data will increase dramatically – Big data analysis promises a lot, and in the long term it will encompass all sorts of manifestations of reality, from transportation to the electricity grid. With the advent of the Internet of Things, databases will be truly enormous and will require more and more tools.
3. The future is written in JavaScript. – The explosion of nuovi dispositivi furniture (counting those mounted in new smartTVs and even in car entertainment centers) gives us an enormous variety of hardware. It is difficult to maintain the pace of a different app to be developed for each platform, and if the need is to maintain a homogeneous code, the app will have to run in a browser: in other words, it will have to be a JavaScript app /HTML5.
I know, these are apparently banal predictions: I like to win easily. They are though trends that represent huge changes in way in which hardware and software will be produced, optimized, distributed. They will be able to produce enormous wealth for the players already in the game, some sensational failures and above all the emergence of new, surprising players who move on a terrain so hated by the old 'dinosaurs': Open Source, which will force big industry to recalibrate (downwards, more and more) profit expectations.
