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Tech Trends 2006

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

What you see today is a result of what happened yesterday,

and what you'll see tomorrow will be a result of what's happening today. If

you want to predict the future with at least some degree of accuracy, you have

to be aware of what happened in the past and present. So this time round,

we're going to make our set of predictions on what to expect in the coming

year based on what's happened throughout this year. Unlike last year, where we

covered 100 different technologies individually, this time we're going to look

at broad areas and tell you about the key technologies in those. At the end of

the day, what good is technology if you can't make use of it? So we predict

which technologies will become hot next year for you to choose from, and which

ones to keep watch on for the coming years. We've also gone beyond

technologies and talked about interesting products derived from them, as well as

the standards that are being worked on. Products are the proof of success for

any technology and standards tell us how much faith we have in it to make

further investments.

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Every technology has a lifecycle. In the beginning,

there's a lot of talk about it, and gradually if it gains acceptance and

everything goes right, it starts being adopted. It flourishes until the time

something new and better comes out, after which it starts losing popularity and

eventually fades away into oblivion. We applied this curve on the 100

technologies we analyzed last

December. This time, we'll apply it to each area that

we've covered. The areas include



wireless, security, storage, data centers, open source, basic hardware, and

software development.

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The curve itself is broken into seven parts: Buzz, Long

Term, Very Hot, Hot, Steady, Lukewarm, and Down. Buzz stands for technologies

that are  really being talked about, but there's no concrete action

happening on them. It may or may not happen. Long Term technologies are those

that will happen in 2-3 years. Very Hot technologies are the talk of the town,

with some early birds implementing them. Hot technologies are those that have

gained critical mass, so you should implement them. Steady technologies have

already been implemented by lots of people, and you should have already done it.

Lukewarm technologies are old news, and loosing visibility. Likewise,

technologies that are down are ones that are loosing ground as well as

visibility to newer trends and technologies.

We hope that the pages to follow help you plan your

investments better in the coming year. Happy reading!

Wireless Exciting Time for

Developers Ahead
Security Storage Matters
Basic Hardware: Innovate or

Die
Data Centers
Enterprise Mobility Open Source

By Anil Chopra, Krishna Kumar, Shekhar Govindrajan, Sujay Sarma and Vinod Unny

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