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!