WITH ongoing turbulence in the global financial markets and rising energy costs, IT managers are likely to embark on the new year facing tight budgets and having to grapple with energy-mitigating technologies.

On the bright side, rapid innovation in connectivity and mobility technologies will give rise to new possibilities for upping personal and workforce productivity in the coming year.

These trends were reflected in a BizIT straw poll which asked the question what technologies will dominate in 2008. Vendors singled out virtualisation, energy-efficient IT, mobility and social networking as top trends to watch.

Other popular picks included knowledge management and data leakage prevention technologies. With an eye on 2008, here are what vendors said:

Social software will meet business

Social networking websites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace grew phenomenally this year. For instance, 15 million visitors above the age of 15 visited Facebook daily in the month of June, a 300 per cent jump from a year ago, according to research firm comScore.

Such prolific take-up rates could herald the flow of social networking technologies into businesses.

Frank Koo, managing director of Oracle Singapore, told BizIT: 'We will see Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, social networks and blogs pervade the business environment in 2008.'

He believes that even sceptical organisations are now being swayed by the tremendous opportunities offered by social networking applications to improve intra- and inter-office collaboration.

Knowledge management becomes important

The rise of social networking applications in business environments will propel technologies that can help capture and harness information in a meaningful way - called knowledge management (KM) - to the fore next year, said Tan Tong Hai, president and CEO of Singapore Computer Systems (SCS). 'This will ensure business continuity if and when companies lose key talents as their knowledge will be captured informally and accurately,' he said.

Energy-efficient IT mindset proliferates

Triggered by rising energy consumption of data centres and soaring oil prices, energy-efficient IT became vogue this year. Bill Padfield, CEO of Datacraft Asia, is already prepping for more demand of such applications next year.

'We are helping clients cut down on data centre energy consumption with server virtualisation solutions and (power-saving) technologies from vendors like Cisco, Emersen and Copan Systems,' he said. But it may not be all rosy with the green IT-movement, which could kick up a downside for some businesses in the form of new and tighter operating mandates.

Research firm Gartner noted recently that rising energy-conscientiousness could trigger more regulations that might 'seriously constrain' companies in building new data centres in 2008.

Data leakage prevention goes mainstream

Data leakage prevention (DLP) technologies became hot commodities this year, evidenced by the spate of DLP acquisitions made in the past months by IT security firms McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and WebSense. Even storage giant EMC got into the DLP act this year.

Darric Hor, Symantec's general manager for Singapore reckoned DLP's growth in Asia will be driven by regulations such as JSOX and Basel II; while Ashley Wearne, McAfee's vice-president for Australia, New Zealand, South- east Asia and India predicted that 'every company will adopt this technology over the next three years'.

Virtualisation allure rises

Virtualisation is a technology that lets businesses run their IT systems at closer to full capacity. Akin to car-pooling, virtualisation is attractive from a cost standpoint because it increases the usage on assets and reduces wastage. Said Steven Leonard, president, EMC Asia-Pacific and Japan, EMC Corp: 'With the pressure to optimise and increase utilisation, virtualisation, whether at the server, file or storage level offers compelling savings to organisations of all sizes.'

Lionel Lim, president, Asia South and greater China, chief of operations, Asia Pacific, Sun Microsystems, cited a Forrester Research study which showed that on average, businesses have applied the technology on 24 per cent of their servers today and plan to double that in the next two years.

The mobility experience grows richer

The wireless and mobility experience will become richer, boosting productivity and connectivity. Vendors that BizIT spoke with identified several hot mobility applications for next year.

Said Raymond Lee, regional director, South East Asia, Adobe Systems: 'VoIP (Voice-over-IP) will go from strength to strength in 2008 especially as WiFi becomes ever more pervasive in Singapore.'

Teo Lay Lim, country managing director of Accenture Singapore said: 'Mobility-support capabilities, such as location and context awareness, integration of voice and data communication, will evolve and converge in mobile devices and PCs, creating a mobile platform for supporting new enterprise and consumer applications.'

Said Lori Sobel, head of Google Singapore: 'More computing functionalities, such as online search, e-mail, videos and maps, will migrate to the mobile phone.'

Anthony Lee, country manager for Kroll Ontrack Singapore predicted the proliferation of TV channel-serving mobile phones and ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs).

And Cynthia Leung, senior analyst at research firm Ovum predicted that nearfield communications (NFC) will take root next year.

She said: 'As part of the GSMA's (GSM Association) Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, 2008 will be the start for NFC-based contactless mobile payment commercial development, with low shipment volumes for the year.'

Is this article useful to you?