| Enabling Technologies:
An Overview of Promising Technologies
Some technologies become successful while others do not. Why the difference? Look at
how past technology wars played out and learn from them.
As an example, extensible markup language (XML) is a winner because it gained
mindshare. Technology and vendors came out and supported it with applications. Its rapid
adoption can be attributed to an absence of major competitors; endorsements by all major
vendors; a smooth, continual rollout of XML standards; and commercial applications coming
to market. It was created by the existing standard generalized markup language (SMGL)
community and is a killer application used on the Internet. Other successful technologies
include relational databases, Java, NT/Visual Basic, and Linux.
Not every technology succeeds. An example of that is object-oriented database (OODB).
Here data is stored in object form rather than conventionally in a relational database.
OODB did not have a standard that was widely supported or a killer application for
implementation. There were strong competitors in this mature field. It was ahead of the
developer community and not ready for prime time when introduced.
Technologies with Potential
Some enabling technologies that show promise are:
Middleware. It is the software applications between the front end and the back
end. Ideally, it moves information from one place to another seamlessly and creates
plumbing infrastructure for application integration.
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). As interoperable enterprise
software, CORBA has a small market share using it. The question for that market share
becomes "Is it the best use of IT budget to change to another relational
database?" Despite following out of favor as a technology, CORBA will not disappear
quickly because it enjoys some implementation.
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). It is a set of distributed, transactional, secure
software components that offers interoperability. It will take any application and work.
The public wants this technology and is asking for it. Support for it is growing. Vendors
that solve problems with it will grab market share.
Application servers. There are a lot of vendors for servers. They can not all
survive; therefore, expect acquisitions and consolidation. There is a lot of hype by
vendors and their claims, but technologists know it can not yet be supported in fact or
performance.
Object transaction monitor. Transaction processing with click stream analysis
will change marketing. Building architecture around high end processing requires a
sophisticated backend to handle traffic and throughput.
Enterprise application integration (EAI). Similar to the message broker
concept, EAI requires a web based strategy where all the transactions and steps are mapped
out. From there, it comes a matter of how old and new technology can successfully
implement the strategy.
Operations and hardware issues. The gap between the central processing unit
(CPU) and system bandwidth limits processing capacity. More technology will be developed
to coordinate resources and input/output (I/O) as the search for economical solutions
continue. While it is difficult to see the difference at the end user level, 64-bit
hardware has potential.
Embedded technology. Products such as smart cards and personal digital
assistants (PDAs) will be very significant.
Java operating system (OS). There is truly no single vendor as it gains market
share.
Evolutionary hardware (HW). Future hardware could have dynamic gating logic on
the chip and the ability to alter the type of business problem it could solve.
Future Expectations
The imaginary world of Buck Rogers and Dick Tracy is not too far fetched when
predicting future technologies. They will include things such as wearable computing,
speech recognition capabilities, and wireless computing. Electronic pagers, cell phones,
and PDAs come to mind as wearable, wireless, convenient, and portable. However, the
infrastructure to support them needs further development as does a solution to the
bandwidth problem. Speech recognition as natural language processing has not yet gone
mainstream. Challenges such as accents, multi-language translation capabilities, and
background noise need viable solutions.
The key to the future is integration in ways never done before. Technologies of the
future will be Internet driven, but the Internet is going to change. Integration of
technology will change the customer management experience. Change will be driven by high
bandwidth, wireless internetworking, high processing power, more natural interfaces, and
convergence of media.
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