IT Predictions for 2008 -- Are Some Too Late?

Yes, there are many pundits proffering predictions on the coming year, but these are ours. In fielding these over lunch at iTKO, we couldn't help but notice a few of them would have been last year's predictions as well... but, even in IT, not all change happens as fast as you might have hoped or feared. 1. SOA and Virtualization will come together at last. In 2007, Virtualization really came of age for the enterprise, thanks to the immediate hardware and configuration costs it saves. The two disciplines have traditionally been considered separate disciplines, as it seems impossible to Virtualize a bunch of distributed Services and mainframe apps that don't live in a centralized data center. However, there will be new ways to start Virtualizing these components and business logic in 2008. 2. BPM and BAM will continue to become more intertwined, and BPM will finally emerge to become the linchpin behind enterprise SOA applications, as compliance to standards and integration issues start to be answered for leading enterprises. 3. Believe it or not, the US Government will emerge as a leader in SOA innovation. Many American firms will lag far behind Uncle Sam on the adoption curve come next New Year. However, on the business side, Europe will lead the enterprise charge for SOA in 2008. 4. Offshoring will continue to increase to meet a growing technical labor and talent crunch, but only the most savvy and collaborative SI firms will succeed and grow to meet this demand. The age of sending work to a "body shop" will fade as businesses realize that without strategy and quality, outsourcing doesn't generate much net benefit. (A holdover from 2007 that is still happening.) 5. Applications as a service, such as SalesForce Apex and Force.com, will emerge as a truly viable alternative for enterprise applications. 6. Many enterprises will stall on SOA efforts, until they give up on the strictly "top-down" architectural approach. (How about this year?) 7. Integration platforms will continue to consolidate, but their customers will have even more heterogeneous systems to manage, as they will be merging and consolidating disparate IT infrastructures as well. (Here's another one from last year, but it's still going on.) 8. Services will start to go mobile as "micro-services" residing on thousands of devices, with light status-based updates feeding into, and out of, a centralized architecture. (Not quite sure what Jason meant here...) 9. RIAs and SaaS will drive further innovation in how multiple enterprises collaborate at a semantic level across heterogeneous systems. 10. NetWeaver-based SOA infrastructures will start to become mainstream in a certain segment of the market. Agree or disagree? We'd love to hear your thoughts and we'll see how many "I told you sos" we can collect out of 10 come next December!