Top 10 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010/11

Gartner has identified 10 mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2011, and as Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says these “10 mobile technologies should be on every organization's radar screen".

So, here we go:

• Bluetooth (3 and 4). Two new Bluetooth versions will emerge by 2011: Bluetooth 3 will introduce 802.11 as a bearer for faster data transmission, and Bluetooth 4 will introduce a new low-energy (LE) mode that will enable communication with external peripherals and sensors.

• The Mobile Web. More smartphones will appear in the world market and that will encourage greater numbers of people to access conventional websites on mobile devices. So, mobile applications will eventually be as important as web pages are today.

• Mobile Widgets. Widgets provide a convenient way to deliver simple, connected applications, especially those involving real-time data updates (such as weather forecasts, e-mail notifications, marketing, blogs and information feeds). They can also be a good first step to assess the demand for an application on a specific platform before undertaking expensive native development.

• Platform-Independent Mobile AD Tools. Even though platform-independent application development (AD) tools cannot deliver a "write once, run anywhere" equivalent to native code, they can significantly reduce the cost of delivering and supporting multiplatform applications that provide a more sophisticated experience than the mobile Web and operate outside signal coverage.

• App stores. They will be the primary distribution channel for mobile applications and a commercial channel to sell applications and content (especially in international markets), and they will provide new options for mobile application sourcing.

• Enhanced Location Awareness. By the end of 2011, over 75 percent of devices shipped in mature markets will include a GPS. GPS will be the primary, but not the only, means of establishing handset location. Wi-Fi and cell ID systems will remain important in situations where GPS is unavailable or unreliable.

• Cellular Broadband. Continuous improvements in wireless broadband performance in 2010 and 2011 will increase the range of applications that no longer require fixed networking, and make cellular broadband a more effective fallback when fixed connections fail. Embedded cellular networking will become a standard feature of many corporate laptops, and will enable new types of network-connected devices and business models, such as e-books and media players.

• Touchscreens. Emerging as the dominant user interface for large-screen handsets? Touchscreens will be included in over 60 percent of mobile devices shipped in Western Europe and North America in 2011. Organizations developing native handset applications may need to exploit single and multitouch interfaces and haptics to give their applications a compelling and competitive user experience.

• M2M. Many network service providers increased their commitment to machine to machine (M2M) in 2009, so a good range of both national and multinational M2M service options will be available in mature markets during 2010 and 2011.

• Device-Independent Security. This isn't strictly a single technology, but refers to a collection of security technologies, application technologies and sourcing options that enable the provisioning of applications that are secure, but less tightly tied to specific devices and platforms, and that, in many cases, do not require security tools to be installed on the client.

Our 2 cents: mobile applications are becoming as critical as corporate websites for a number of reasons. They provide unmatched user experience to the increasing community of owners of powerful smartphones and other mobile devices. Marketers will keep leveraging the proximity, both physical and emotional, of mobile devices, first and foremost smartphones, to place their products closer to buyers. Predictions about which platform (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or something new we haven’t yet heard of) will take the lead in the coming two years are more difficult to make, but it’s evident that mobile application development market has a very bright future ahead.


Source: Gartner

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2010 is the Year of Transition, Gartner Says

On the threshold of the publication of the 2010 edition of Gartner’s annual CIO Survey, where 1600 of CIOs were asked about their plans and priorities for the year, Mark McDonald, GVP of Gartner Executive Programs, shared some of its findings.

According to the survey, 2010 will be a time of transition from recession to recovery economically, strategically from a focus on efficiency to productivity, and technically speaking from heavyweight to lightweight technologies. But all the while IT budgets will remain tight. Only 6% of the polled CIOs see actual real growth coming in 2010.

Leading CIOs are inventing new rules for the new economy with the focus on productivity, collaboration, and innovation. Strategically CIOs are reshaping their focus from cost efficiency to productivity. This shift is critical for capturing customers and market shares. Additionally, business leaders are reconnecting IT with business performance.

Interesting is the 3-year forecast: by 2013 CIOs see technology as transitioning their role from technology service provider to a source of competitive advantage. This trend is also observed by Zinnov in the outsourced product development space we discussed earlier.

Technology choices are transforming as well. CIOs predict a shift to lightweight technologies that can be implemented quickly without significant expense. For instance, virtualization is the top technology, followed by cloud computing and social tools. Virtualization investment expenses are expected to accelerate in 2010 as Gartner estimates that until now only about 1 in 5 services has been virtualized.

Based on the results of the survey, Gartner recommends CIOs to concentrate on operational results and relationships as well as to focus more on raising productivity than on cutting costs as raising productivity increases opportunity to create value while cutting costs doesn’t drive growth.

2010 should be a year of the transition from IT being a resource based, back office function to a result-based source of innovation and advantage.

Source: Gartner

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R&D Partnerships Should Become More Strategic

A recent study conducted by Zinnov on Software R&D globalization revealed that only 5% of this R&D spend is currently being spent on outsourced partnerships, which means about 95% of the R&D is made by companies in-house. This presents a tremendous growth opportunity for companies providing Outsourced Product Development services.

We attended the webinar on 'Globalization Opportunities in Software Development for Enterprises and ISVs' where Zinnov experts shared further research results.

Vamsee Tirukkala, Co-Founder & Managing Principal, Zinnov, commented on the trend that companies leverage 3rd party global centers mainly for cost savings and access to relevant talent. 83% of the audience confirmed the increasing importance of OPD by answering affirmatively to one of the audience poll’s questions (“Are companies increasingly looking at OPD service providers for global RnD and product development?”).

With a freeze on spending in the face of recession and plans to optimize on investments made over the past 12 months, companies need to rapidly evolve and transform their emerging location centers to increase their innovation capabilities.
Mr. Tirukkala also advised software producers to rapidly their OPD partnerships to the next level with more engineering and product leadership and strategic responsibility. Another audience poll showed that customers consider China and Eastern Europe to be the next most attractive locations for R&D investment, following India that leads in resource volumes, while Eastern Europe is a hot spot of software engineering talent.

Globalization opportunities for enterprises and ISVs seem bright, according to Zinnov, with several small and medium sized companies beginning to work directly with 3rd party providers. “A huge trend we are seeing in the industry in the last 18 months is what we call as the 'go to market' strategy. It’s what vendor partners can bring to the table. If you are a partner in a well-known reputed company, they have the capability to take your product to multiple markets," commented Mr. Tirukkala.

The new pricing models (outcome based pricing, revenue share pricing and risk reward pricing) offered by vendors to clients are adding to the attractiveness of partnerships, he said.

Source: Global Services

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In-House or Outsourced IT Infrastructure?

According to a new research, commissioned by Savvis Inc., a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, the number of companies that outsource their IT infrastructure is expected to increase drastically from 17 percent today to 64 percent in 2020. This independent survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, a research-based technology marketing consultancy.

The research firm surveyed more than 600 IT and business decision makers from mid to large enterprises and public sector organizations based in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

Sixty-one percent of respondents believe managing IT in-house provides no competitive advantage and has to stop.

"With the rise in acceptance of outsourcing within the IT industry, and the related economies of scale that accompany the managed services model, businesses are finding it difficult to justify owning their own IT infrastructures," said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis, Inc.

It was also revealed that the UK will see the biggest shift from in-house IT infrastructure to outsourcing, falling from 90 percent today to 23 percent in 2020, the USA from 82 percent to 49 percent and Singapore from 62 percent to 38 percent.

In looking at 2010, organizations cited cost savings (58 percent) and growing revenue (54 percent) as their top strategic priorities. The biggest issue organizations face concerns doing more with less budget (54 percent).

Source: Savvis, Inc.

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