Comment: IT's past, present and future

The past year in the IT industry has been one of slow recovery and tiny forward steps.

The first piece of good news was that the industry as a whole recovered quite well from the dot-com collapse of the previous year, and businesses still maintained faith - though they were slightly more cautious - in the Internet as a medium for transacting business. And those few dot-com companies that did survive the blood-letting started to make gains in the market. One or two even turned a profit; not something that would have been widely forecast 18 months ago.

Faith in the Internet and allied solutions was helped immeasurably by vendors of Web services technology showing a united front. Given the possibilities of the Web services model, failure is unlikely. The hope for the coming year is that we don't see a fragmentation of the technology - or at least that we don't see much fragmentation.

Over the coming year related technology for grid computing, to share computer resources, will work its way into the hearts and minds of organisations. Already Sun Microsystems has some good wins in this area, and this puts it in a strong position to make advances in the next 12 months.

Interestingly, grid computing and Web services are likely to follow a similar path to implementation. Currently, pioneering firms are trying out these technologies in-house, with plans to extend the systems to trusted partners further down the line. Extensive rollouts across the Internet to all and sundry will take longer.

Companies are being cautious. They want to see these technologies working before they expose themselves to too much risk - no one is running around screaming, "If you're not doing Web services you're toast!"

Following the Enron debacle and other accounting scandals, it was heartening to see, in a schadenfreude sort of way, that not all the problems in corporate America concerned IT-related companies. However, it did lead one to wonder why there wasn't a sudden rush to purchase new accounting software, because the old software appeared to be fatally flawed. Perhaps it says something about human nature that sales of document shredders outstripped sales of accounting packages for the first time ever.

The most obvious shift for IT is that firms are taking a more extended view of infrastructure. The delineations that existed through the ubiquitous technology stack are becoming blurred. A prime example of this is the coming together of databases, document and content management, and business information systems.

A more holistic view of technology is being adopted by firms, and this trend will continue through their integration strategies. We are no longer looking at technology in isolated silos, but as a key component of larger business processes.

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