Top technologies, challenges and opportunities in 2008 20 January, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

These predictions are based on RTTS's observations of Fortune 500 companies, its dealings with its partners such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Compuware and its own observations of the technology field.

"Running multiple environments is way too expensive and we keep on buying more and more boxes and a lot of customers are running out of physical space but to allow multiple environments to run on one box [with virtualization] gives you tremendous savings," said Bill Hayduk, president and CEO of RTTS.

But virtualization is still more complex and confusing than it should be, so tools and services from the likes of VMware that are intended to simplify virtualization deployments -- easing existing migration, performance, and security concerns -- will be snapped up eagerly, he added.

Testing and performance analysis to plan and fine-tune the consolidation of technological assets will also be critical.

"Virtualization is going to make this a lot more interesting and easier to do," Hayduk said.

Another prediction is that security will be seen across the board. "Companies are security conscious now," said Hayduk. He added that security concerns are finally becoming firmly embedded into many corporate cultures and any company who consults/tests/deploys software now needs to have genuine security expertise. As the costs of data breaches rise, real security will finally become the foundation and framework of software development and testing.

Also in 2008, RTTS predicts that development teams will move towards an application lifecycle quality management (ALM) model that helps with productivity, simplifies deployment and often results in better, more business-goal centered applications. Hayduk said that application lifecycle quality management has always been the poor stepchild in the development community.

"It is becoming more and more complex tying multiple systems together," noted Hayduk. "There is a lot of data integration and application integration that it is becoming more and more evident that people have to wrap software quality around it and application lifecycle management has become a natural progression."

For ALM to really work though, software quality testing processes need to be part of the entire development process, rather than happening late in the application development lifecycle, as is traditional. Companies that don't test throughout the entire process will be deeply disappointed with ALM.

Another trend that will emerge in 2008 is Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which are increasingly becoming the lightweight, agile app model of choice for the development community. Hayduk cited the emergence of AJAX as an example. RTTS predicts that RIAs will gain real traction within the enterprise (think Intranet 2.0), providing a simple way to mashup existing Web services and deploy them quickly for internal and external use. Look also for sticking points to arise that may hamper RIAs' potentials; primarily lack of existing solid back end services along with regulatory and compliance concerns. But in the end, the ROI provided by thoughtfully planned RIA projects will win the day.

As well, RTTS believes that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is going to become hot in 2008. SOA is an agile development framework, but if business process modeling and other parts of the puzzle such as RIAs and information management aren't already in place, SOA won't deliver benefits. 2008 is likely to be the year that enterprises take a cold, hard look at SOA and determine how to use it to its best potential, and start building structures to support it.

"Everybody is looking to offer their clients more information, more products, more services and I think that is one of the things that they are going to be able to do is expose them to other information streams [with SOA]," said Hayduk.

Software-as-a-service will also be big in 2008, according to RTTS. Businesses are increasingly uninterested in upgrading software for financial and productivity reasons. For example, dealing with deploying patches has become a significant time and cost burden. The desires of software vendors and businesses dovetail nicely with SaaS because vendors get a steady stream of income, and businesses are relieved of licensing costs, deployment and maintenance chores. Look for an increasing number of companies to lease at least some of their applications this year.

As well, 2008 will be the year that open source hits the enterprise. "As we move into a web-centric, mashed-up, shared knowledge world of cloud computing, expect to see open source become ever more enmeshed in critical enterprise applications," Hayduk stated.

2008 would also see a big push from companies to attract and keep qualified personnel. Hayduk believed that organizations are struggling to find qualified candidates, because the continued effects of the dot com crash and widespread outsourcing of IT jobs has led to fewer college students choosing technical majors. Over the next couple of years hiring IT personnel may become a challenge for companies lacking a strong recruitment and retention program. The best way to attract and keep qualified people is to invest in their professional development and RTTS expects to see an increase in training in both hard and soft skills as the IT talent pool shrinks.

Also noteworthy, RTTS predicted many companies would move back to in-house or onshore outsourcing models due to complicated management needs of remote projects, cultural differences, diverse security and regulatory standards and lack of complete managerial control with international outsourcing.