Tech Predictions 2012

It is now a well-known fact that the IT infrastructure is undergoing some fundamental changes thanks to a slew of new technologies that became popular over the past 2-3 years. What's still being debated is the ultimate impact that these technologies will have on the IT infrastructure, the individual, their work as well as personal lives.

Take social networking for instance, which has the whole world hooked on. Everyday, there are millions of comments/photos/videos/etc being posted on these sites. This creates a wealth of information, but unless it's analyzed properly, all this data is completely useless. Similarly, there's a whole lot of data sitting in emails, audio, video, metadata, web pages, and so on. If it just lies there, it will only chew up your storage and bring you nothing but big, fat electricity bills just to hold on to it. But suppose you could some how start making sense of this data. If you could for instance, analyze different types of comments sitting on various social networking sites, to understand what kinds of people are out there and what are their interest areas. This opens up a plethora of marketing opportunities for a lot of companies. This is just one example, and there are technologies being developed to anlayze this unstructured data and make sense of it.

Mobility is another example. The slew of smartphones and tablets that have thronged the market present a whale of opportunities for organizations. For one, organizations could allow users to bring their own devices to the office, and use them instead of handing them official PCs and laptops. While this saves the CIO some amount of IT budget from the hardware side, it opens up a pandora's box full of security issues, control issues, remote management issues, etc. So you'll now need technologies to manage this slew of mobile devices and their security.

Likewise, there's the cloud, which has given to the world a slew of new technologies, like SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, etc. As more users start using cloud based services, a lot of data will be generated. Do users keep it stored in the cloud or download it locally? What about the web browser that is the interaction medium between the users and the apps on the cloud? With so many different apps, the web browser has to evolve to handle them.

Just like cloud computing, mobility, and social networking, there are many other technologies that are ready for the next evolution. Mobile VAS for instance, is seeing a lot of growth, but is at the same time struggling with TRAI regulations on one side, and giving the lion's share of revenue to the telecom service provider on the other. We delve into the various trends that'll help shape-up this area.

IP surveillance for instance, has been used by the govt. and enterprises to secure their premises. It is now being used at the personal level where individual users can benefit from it. Plus of course, the software to analyze the video captured by this tech is evolving. We delve into how things are panning out in this space.

With a whole range of electronic gadgetry out there, everyone has become used to carry multiple devices around. One major challenge here is with the chargers for these devices. Each one has a different connector. This creates a lot of problems. That's why the industry is now talking about having a common USB interface for chargers. Will it materialize in the next year? You can read about it in the article on standardized chargers.

3G has come in, but it is still to become successful. Yet, there are talks about bringing 4G next year. Will it happen or not? We tell you in a separate article on mobile broadband.

These are some of the things we've got for you in our feature story this time. We have given predictions written by our internal experts as well as those from the industry, on what's in store for you across a whole range of different technologies.

Hope you have a great new year ahead!