peering into the crystal ball (photo credit: fotoedge @flickr.com)

The Panel

Jim Kobielus – sr. analyst @ Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst ; Tony Baer, sr. analyst @ Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst @ Current Analysis; Dave Linthicum, CEO of Blue Mountain Labs; Dave Lounsbury, VP of collaboration services @ The Open Group; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant and finally, discussion moderator Dana Gardner, principal analyst @ Interarbor Solutions.

The Format

The discussion was recorded and shared as a podcast. To download the podcast or read a full text transcript of the discussion, scroll to the bottom of this blog post.

Key Predictions / Trends for 2010 and Beyond

Clouds are going to become less cloudy. Vendors, particularly those in the collaboration space, are going to start to deliver solutions that are actually a blend of both cloud and on-premise.

Mobile OS wars are going to heat up.

Privacy becomes important. People are going to move away from these social media sites that post their private information, and the social media sites are going to react to that.

Cloud crashes will make major new stories. Cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they’re going to crash. We’re going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We’re going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things.

SOA and BI. There is going to be a big feeding frenzy in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, in the business intelligence (BI) world. IT is increasingly going to in-source much of BI development of reports, queries, dashboards, and the like to the user through mash up self-service approaches, SaaS, flexible visualization, and so forth.

Development of cloud deployment and development skills as a recognized job function in the IT world, whether it’s internal to the IT department or as a consultancy is going to be in high demand.

There will be an increasing convergence of analytics and transactional computing, and the data warehouse is the hub of all that.

Analytics will get dirt cheap.

Google Wave is really going to kick in in 2010

Enterprise IT Spending: In the enterprise application area, we’re going to see more-and-more pushback against where money is being spent. The economy is growing, but there is going to be a lot of attention paid to where IT dollars are going.

Enterprise IT Labor. We’re at a point where the market is based on all these other things based on the cloud. We had a lot of disruptive technologies hit in the past five years — enterprise mashups, SOA, and cloud computing. The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them. 2010 has to be a year for training, rebuilding, and getting some of those skills up.

The Big 2 – Microsoft & Google: Microsoft will be struggling to stay relevant. while Google meets a struggle for focus.

Download the entire Podcast here
Read the entire transcript here

• Significantly improve the core pillars of the developer experience
• Support for the latest platforms spanning the client, web, server, services and devices
• Targeted and simplified developer experiences for different application types
• Architectural improvements to the tools platform for better modularity and extensibility

All sounds very interesting, but from what I know and in speaking with other developers and peers in the Industry,  most of us are still developing client facing business applications in Visual Studio 2005 and .Net Framework 2.0. Some of us (including me) have just started migrating to Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. So many new features to learn and master, it makes many of us wonder, “how will we ever be able to keep up with the latest technologies ?”, especially in the .Net world, where Microsoft continues to put out new versions every 12 months or so ?

Run rabbit run,
Dig that hole in the sun,
When at last the work is done,
Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one.

That was one of my friend’s response. What is yours ?
Further Reading

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview
• What’s next for Visual Studio and .NET FX?
• Visual Studio 2010 in Action on Channel 9
• The Road to PDC – .NET Framework 4.0 and ‘Dublin’