2010

THE RECESSION HANGOVER is still with us, but there are reasons for the ICT sector to feel optimistic this year. Better and cheaper bandwidth are likely to mean a boost for players in the web hosting, content and cloud computing spaces, with possible spin-offs for PC and notebook industries.

The mobile sector is still growing strongly in Africa, and South African web and mobile players may find plenty of room for growth in neighbouring countries.

According to Gartner, this year`s top strategic technologies will include cloud computing, advanced analytics, client computing, green IT, the reshaping of the data centre, social computing, security  ctive monitoring, flash memory, virtualisation for availability and mobile applications.

Of these strategic technologies, cloud computing is getting much of the attention. According to HP, cloud computing will have a major impact over the next four years. HP`s VP and GM of software products, Robin Purohit, said at HP`s recent annual Software Universe Conference in Hamburg, Germany, that cloud has the potential to bring the agility and flexibility of a start-up into large organisations.

"Over the next four years, the rate of growth of cloud computing is going to outstrip other IT growth by about six times," he said. "We`re not here to hype cloud technology: we know it`s early. But we`re seeing some incredible promise and businesses are very interested in how they can leverage it to innovate and save costs."

On the other hand, a recent international study carried out by Datamonitor for BT Global Services found evidence suggesting that, if cloud services are to make the breakthrough analysts predict, perceptions among CIOs and senior business executives need to be addressed. For example, 53% of CIOs fail to see how cloud computing can save them money, even though the cloud delivery model is designed to reduce or eradicate capital expenditure requirements. The majority of CIOs (57%) and senior executives (53%) are not happy to run applications and store data on servers based outside their country, suggesting that a meaningful global market for cloud services is still evolving.

Green IT is also steadily gaining ground. Gartner says that by 2014, the strategies of at least two-thirds of organisations will exploit or risk-mitigate environmental sustainability.

Gartner says: "Driven by sustainability initiatives, by 2014, electricity prices will have risen by an average of 30% in real terms across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries."

South Africa has been warned of even steeper power price hikes in the years to come.

Gartner says IT vendors that seek to position energy efficiency as a key differentiator of their product or service portfolio must complete an environmental life cycle and sustainability assessment to determine the energy footprint in the design, production and distribution phases as well as the recycling and reuse phases.  It says the level of environmental sustainability in vendor brand, offerings and environmental life cycle implementations will become one of the top differentiation criteria by 2012.

2010 WORLD CUP MAY DRIVE IT SKILLS DEMAND

Up to 11 500 IT professionals may be needed to sustain and implement the FIFA World Cup, say reports. Ian Yoell, regional director of global qualifications for awarding body, Edexcel, said a recent six-city tour by a FIFA delegation had highlighted several areas of improvement for the IT sector ahead of the 2010 soccer games - much of these requiring specialised IT practitioners.

TECH STOCKS LOOKING BRIGHTER

By Nicola Mawson, ITWeb

Absa Investments analyst Chris Gilmour expects robust demand for IT this year, which should bolster share prices. Technology stocks were trading higher on the second trading day in the new year than they were a year ago.

Gilmour says IT is expected to continue it upward trend. "It`s a good sector to be in, both locally and globally, because of its ability to help enterprises push costs down."

He adds that the real economy has a demand for IT, which has influenced stocks recently. He expects this demand to continue to grow faster than the economy.

GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE CLOUD

By Mike Styer, Country Manager NetApp South Africa

Manageability of the cloud is becoming a critical success factor

Tying together the different infrastructure layers including applications, virtual machines, systems, networks and storage, with a comprehensive set of management tools reduces complexity by providing end-to-end service visibility, performance monitoring, and automated provisioning.

Natural selection will begin in the cloud service provider space

Some early adopters of the cloud business model will partner with these successful service providers who have demonstrated that they can offer enterprise class IT as a service cheaper and with better service levels than they can do it themselves.

Secure multi-tenancy will become imperative

A virtualised shared infrastructure environment results in multiple `tenants` occupying the same infrastructure. These tenants need to be assured that sharing is safe, both from a security perspective and a performance perspective.

Companies will need a better grasp of how to standardise, consolidate, and virtualise their IT environments

Companies who want to realise a true service-oriented architecture will need to start by planning to standardise and consolidate first, in order to build a shared virtualised infrastructure.

Security and privacy issues will come more into focus

It will be important to define SLAs to effectively measure IT performance

More internal enterprise IT departments will be measured against the service levels, costs, and provisioning speeds that are offered in comparison by public cloud providers

By implementing "service catalogues", meaning a finite set of configurations with associated service levels, costs, and delivery times, IT organisations can reduce their procurement and management costs.

Cloud architectures will be driven by standardisation (Ethernet), virtualisation (servers, storage), and efficiency (asset, operations, environmental)

Without standardisation, every service offering would be custom which would not only increase upfront deployment costs and ongoing management costs, but also make it difficult to measure the effectiveness of each offering.

Companies will trend toward shared, but self-hosted infrastructure behind virtualised servers and co-existence of siloed application stacks

The move toward cloud architectures will not happen overnight. Shared, virtualised infrastructures will become the de facto choice for new application roll-outs, but enterprises will continue to maintain a hybrid environment for years to come.

Platform as a service (Paas) will become a major focus in 2010, thanks to the launch of Azure

The potential for cloud computing extends beyond hypervisor-centric infrastructure as a service resource-sharing.  Successful software as a service (Saas) cloud offerings today include powerful underlying Paas engines such as Force.com, Google Apps, and Intuit QuickBase Online. These Paas engines offer the necessary customisation of otherwise rigid Saas workflows and reports. The advent of Microsoft`s Azure, coupled with a huge and loyal developer base will accelerate adoption of next-gen cloud-centric applications.

CHALLENGING INGENUITY

By Hedley Hurwitz, MD of Magix Integration

Talk of an upturn in the economy in 2010 may signal a budget boost for some departments, but IT should not be expecting to be in the money this year. When it comes to business software specifically, lack of funds without a reduction in demands is going to press IT to do more, faster, with less.

While there are bound to be many problems to face during the year, here are the three primary areas in which 2010 is going to challenge the ingenuity and innovative capabilities of IT.

1. Enterprise integration: Lack of funds to buy new and improved integrated applications will result in more companies initiating integration projects themselves. The lack of skills and experience in this area will prove a serious challenge.

2. Asset management: As if South African companies are not struggling enough to manage their non-mobile IT and communications assets, in 2010 they will have to learn how to manage their mobile assets as well. Controlling hardware, software and data assets and optimising the use thereof will be a crucial challenge this year.

3. Risk management: An old and unwelcome topic in IT, but one that needs to be taken seriously in light of stricter governance and compliance rules, risk management will be top of mind. With customisable malware and spyware, as well as small, portable storage devices freely available, local companies will continue to be plagued by internal threats.

While these issues are all negatives IT must deal with, the implications also leave the door open for the emergence of professional, quality IT practitioners offering real expertise and solutions using the appropriate technology enablers to support business operations and processes.