I attended the Event Processing Summit in Orlando last week and probably the most interesting presentation was given by Dr. Mani Chandi from the California Institute of Technology. Mani did a great job of explaining the important role that event processing plays today but it was his vision of the future that really caught my interest.
Mani described what he said would be the next big thing in IT that the analysts would be talking about in 2017. He took us through history and explained how innovation focuses on the most scarce resources. In the 60's the most scarce resource was the mainframe, namely the computation power. From that, innovation led us to the distributed model of client server computing. The next wave of innovation dealt with the scarce resource of communication and bandwidth which led to the great internet revolution and high speed access. The current wave of innovation is in the area of integration and information, both internal and external. There is such a high demand for systems to talk to one another that SOA has become mainstream.
So what is the next scarce resource? According to Mani, it is time and attention. Now that we have solved the issues with computing power, communication and bandwidth, and application integration, the next hurdle to overcome is dealing with the enormous amount of information we have at our fingertips. The next wave of innovation may be focused on some combination of Web 2.0 technologies, complex event processing, and business intelligence. Here are Mani's predictions:
- Systems will predict your needs without explicit work on your part
- "CEO need in 2017 is what kids use today"
- We will move from a reactive web to a proactive web
Focus your development effort on the scarcest resource.
