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In the fortune-telling dodge, there are no wrong predictions; just events that haven’t happened yet. Flying cars? Machines
that think? My son cleaning his room? Hey, it could happen someday. Well, we’re not playing that game. In the following 15
essays, InfoWorld’s bloggers and columnists are looking near-term, reading their tea leaves to identify “the next big thing”
in disciplines from app dev to virtualization. Because the writers are domain experts, their predictions for tomorrow’s breakthrough
technologies are grounded in what’s happening today. Even so, some of our predictions are likely to be off course; technology
is funny that way. So we’d like to hear additional opinions: What do you think the Next Big Thing will be? There’s a Talkback
opportunity at the end of each section. Tell us what you think, and let’s get this debate started. -- Steve Fox
Green IT: Shuffling virtual servers for optimum power efficiency
Today's datacenters squander AC power on excess capacity. But what if you could assemble dynamic, virtual server farms on
the fly and consume only the power you need?
Storage: Services in the cloud will meet tomorrow’s storage needs
Storage remains a bear to manage -- and few signs point to significant improvement. The solution? Let someone else do it
SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud
Applications delivered through the browser keep SMBs nimble by eliminating application maintenance costs
Databases: Packing larger sizes into smaller spaces
Databases are ballooning to gargantuan proportions, killing performance. That's why the next frontier is new compression technology
Middleware: Sharing behavior across a service-oriented landscape
New middleware will expose methods or service calls as if the whole application infrastructure were running on one big, local
system
Security: The great privacy compromise
No magic technology bullet will solve the ongoing crisis in enterprise security. The answer is political -- and a long way
off
Networks: A fabric smarter than its end points
As switches, routers, and servers bulk up on processing power, the pendulum is swinging back to intelligence residing in the
network itself
Desktop technology: Streaming to a screen near you
The technology is finally here for application virtualization, which solves the desktop management problem that has cursed
IT for decades
Virtualization: A new era of roaming desktops
Application virtualization will make IT’s life much simpler by separating application code from the platform on which it runs.
And the technology is ready to roll
Offshoring: Staying closer to home
India and China are about to get some competition, thanks to a recent surge in near-shoring in Canada and Latin America
Business models: A million ways to pay as you go
In a few years time, what will it be like to buy software by subscription? Consult your mobile phone calling plan for a preview
Open source: Innovation through recombination
The stage is set for open source to reinvent itself, fashioning new solutions by borrowing the best code across a broad spectrum
of software
Application development: The new face of Internet apps
Blending the best of conventional desktop and Web apps, rich Internet applications occupy the hottest app dev real estate
around
Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores
The era of the big, muscular CPU is on the decline. The real trend is toward slicing and dicing cores virtually, one for each
thread
High-performance computing: Supercomputing everywhere
Plummeting costs, Moore's Law, and creative new applications are making high-performance computing a commodity
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