Technology roadmap of the future

Ten areas of technology that will take us to the next level of computing;

thoughts from technology visionaries on the future of computing and some

internationally known products and technologies developed out of India. Excited

to ride the wave? Read on...

The good thing about every economic slowdown is that it provides everyone a

chance to identify new opportunities for growth in the future, which can be

leveraged the moment it starts to spring back up. Take the web for instance.

After the dot com bust, it emerged as a strong medium for information exchange,

with a slew of new technologies for social networking, blogs, wikis, etc. Now

the focus is towards making it even more intelligent and interactive, a concept

known as the semantic web.

Likewise, mobile and wireless is one of the most exciting areas of IT today,

with so many new products, technologies, and services having been launched this

year. Now, with more than 350 million mobile subscribers across the country,

less power hungry processors, and higher bandwidth wireless technologies, this

area will see some exciting times during the coming year.

Another opportunity that organizations leverage during a slowdown is

optimization of their existing IT infrastructure to get more out of it. That's

where technologies like virtualization and Green IT can play a major role. If

you can make your IT greener, you can make significant savings in your energy

bills. The web also becomes important as it makes for more efficient

communication at lesser cost. Cloud computing is also being considered as a good

technology to deploy and use applications without worrying about the underlying

hardware resources and their scalability.

In the pages to follow, we've taken ten areas of IT, some of which we just

discussed, and tell you about their growth next year and in the years to come.

Apart from that, we've also taken inputs from Indian Research Labs of Microsoft

and IBM to find out where is computing headed in the future.

Lastly, we end the story with “Made in India”, a special section dedicated to

some of the hottest products and technologies that have been developed out of

India and are now being used by the whole world.

So if you want to ride the next wave of computing or shape its future

yourself, then the time to start learning how to surf is now, during the slow

down. We hope the hot areas of technology that we've covered will help you on

this journey.

Happy reading and may you emerge stronger, more confident, and introduce the

next best thing in IT. All the best!