Gartner is showing their top 10 disruptive technologies for 2008 right now here in Barcelona, and there’s some great stuff in here for us. I’m going to stick with the top 5 as we have plenty to think about there, and frankly the bottom 5 are a bit less clear so there’s not as much in there which says “do something now!!!!”. (List is ranked in importance by Gartner.)
- Multi-core - we’ve already factored SONAR for multi-threading, so we are in good shape to take advantage of multi-core solutions, provided of course we are on top of any OS that supports multi-core well. I think for Debian 64 we are pretty solid at least up to the number of cores we’re likely to see in the near future.
- Virtualization - as you’ve seen in some of our other posts, we view virtualization as a great way to manage a complete SONAR install. It’s not the only way, of course - eg a VM is vastly larger (and often somewhat slower) than a native solution, however virtualization lets us build a complete working OS, JVM and SONAR solution here in the Trampery without having to worry about the underlying OS or Enterprise environment. VMWare FTW! (Hypervisors, as it turns out, are really important. Who knew?)
- Social Networks and Social Software - w007! SONAR FTW!!! Nice to see Gartner putting this as number 3!
- Cloud Computing and Cloud/Web Platforms - Gartner is basically saying that IT needs to just get over the whole “my stuff can’t run on a computer with their stuff” thing. Gartner note that Enterprises should know they can survive this because any enterprise which doesn’t actively BLOCK Google is sharing significant computing with, well, everyone else using google, and yet still everyone uses google and nothing bad seems to happen. We would love to run a hosted environment for customers on a third party like Amazon, however so far we’ve found that the security and overall risk-management concerns have prevented this. I look forward to trying this out - it could really free us up in some ways that could be quite handy for both us and for our customers.
- Web Mashups - this is something we are, quite recently, seeing a lot more interest in, primarily from other Enterprise-serving vendors who see SONAR as providing them with some great capabilities they would have to work really hard to build themselves. We’ve started work on a meta-data framework and API which we think will radically improve what we can do in a mash-up environment, so stay tuned for more information on that.
All in all, it’s pretty cool to be either directly providing or directly supporting so much here.
