Spotting an emerging technology and timing its adoption is an
Olympic challenge. Here's our guide to the best bets, from Nathalie
Towner
The technology industry is moving further and further away from
its frontier days and is now slowly adapting to the needs of the
mass market.
The key issues are no longer about grabbing the headlines with
fantastic predictions but about providing convenience with a
quality service. Bluetooth is a prime example and as it is adapted
to general use demand is expected to increase.
The failure of WAP to deliver on the hype has been well
documented but now the focus is on what will succeed in replacing
it.
Predictions indicate that more and more UK companies will choose
to outsource their IT to application service providers as has
already happened in the US. The wisdom of concentrating on core
competencies and outsourcing IT requirements has already been
proven by the success of Cisco. Skills shortages will be a strong
inducement to many companies, as will promises of faster
implementation of applications.
But until companies are convinced that their data is secure,
progress will be slow. End users need to be convinced and until
this happens e-business growth will remain stunted. The race to
become the leading provider of internet security software is
already well under way but in 2001 we should finally start getting
results.
Here is a selection of predictions for the winning and losing
technologies of 2001
Simon Bazalgette
Chief Executive of Music Choice Europe
Winners
The most successful technologies of the future will be those
that make life easiest for the consumer and, in 2001, I believe
interactive services via digital interactive TV such as Sky Digital
and Open Interactive and 3G telephony will take the lead.
Interactive television services look set to become invaluable to
e-business due to the fact that with a 99% penetration rate,
television is the mass-market portal. With everyone in the UK
familiar with how television works, it seems much easier to extend
the use of a medium that is so deeply ingrained in the population
than to introduce a new one. In the UK, digital TV is already in
over 30% of homes and there is evidence to show that it will soon
exceed home Internet access.
Where 3G telephony is concerned, the phenomenal uptake of mobile
phones in the UK has made transactions and interaction via mobile
handsets a highly viable and profitable option for e-business. As
3G telephony will enable mobile phones to incorporate databases,
organisers and personal stereo facilities, it is likely that phones
will be used to make numerous everyday transactions.
Losers
In comparison, whilst 3G telephony will make positive advances,
WAP has already proved a disappointing interim technology and will
be quickly surpassed by 3G technology in 2001. Whilst WAP was
undeniably a major step forward, 3G will truly enable mobile
telephony to deliver.
I believe that digital radio, or Digital Audio Broadcasting
(DAB) as it is otherwise known, is not going to see a promising
year in 2001. DAB protagonists have long promised the public a
revolution in listening, however for reasons of cost and
application, digital radio can only achieve slow growth. It has
simply come too little too late, with other digital technologies
leapfrogging DAB as a viable solution for new audio services. After
all, with 15 million homes in Europe receiving digital radio
programmes via digital TV, is there really a place for DAB
receivers?
Jonathan Stephenson
Independent Consultant
Winners
The year 2000 has vindicated a lot of the dot.com sceptics by
delivering some major reality checks. Old-fashioned concepts such
as profit and turnover are coming back into fashion. The
aftershocks have rocked share prices and turned attention towards
business-to-business commerce where there are established blue-chip
players with major IT budgets to go after. B2B is much more what we
are used to dealing with in IT; the focus is cutting costs of
information management and using auctions to lower the purchase
price. With these thoughts in mind I have picked out one
'free-to-use' product and two commercial products for 2001.
The free-to-use product is a bunch of Java applets built by a
research group in the Computer Science Dept of Washington Univ. in
St Louis. It is called eMediator and is described as a next
generation e-commerce server. Its author Tuomas Sandholm describes
it in his paper as "demonstrating some ways in which AI,
algorithmic support, and game theoretic incentive engineering can
jointly improve the efficiency of e-commerce". See
e-commerce.cs.wustl.edu
The commercial products are both about content management and
delivery, with the first being Actuate, a web-based interactive
report builder. It never ceases to amaze me that so many
development environments, Java, COM or 4GL stop short of decent
reporting tools. It is always the reports that take the time to
build, and with thin clients, being able to print business reports
is even more important.
My second is Documentum's 4i eBusiness Edition. With Web sites
becoming more dynamic, bigger and containing a more complex mix of
multi-media object types, the opportunities for a company that can
take the pain out of managing and assembling pages in real-time are
obvious.
Dr Roger Till
External Affairs Director, e centre UK
Winners
Electronic document management systems -will become a
requirement for many organisations to handle and store their
electronic records securely. Digital signatures will become
important. Always being connected means that my PC, my mobile and
my personal organiser will keep each other updated so that I have
only one set of seamless information at all times, wherever I
happen to be.
Losers
WAP - let's kill the hype and recognise the real applications.
Proprietary solutions - business users need simple, open business
data content standards in this world of global e-business vendor
specific ones.
Judith A. Jerome
Information Analyst, Bloor Research
Winners
The technology to watch out for in 2001 is wireless. No surprise
there, I suppose, and the application that has the most bang for
its buck is Bluetooth.
We see it moving beyond the gadget stage and becoming truly
workable in laptops and handhelds along with short distance
Bluetooth networks.
Our second prediction concerns the very widely defined issue of
security. Included in that are issues surrounding email privacy in
the workplace,increasing government regulation on an international
level and issues to do with intellectual property and content
ownership and encryption. Also there's the continuing Napster
wavelets. The music industry will be unable to maintain its
continuing litigiously vigilante posture as other venues morph from
the Napster model. Good examples of this are the decentralised
open-source programs like Gnutella and FreeNet.
Losers
The free-wheeling, ride-the-range, anything-goes business plan
is on the way out. The dot coms which come to light next year will
be the more thoughtful and intentionally directed businesses, which
will be based in solidly researched ideas.
Reasons for this include the continuing problems afflicting the
industry giant, Amazon, and the drying up of venture capital as
those strike-it-rich investors have struck-it-wrong last year. All
of the new entrepreneurs will be tasting a bit of the 'hair of the
dog' in 2001.
Knowing that we will be ducking the thrown cartons and cans of
the cultists, we see the Apple Macintosh becoming even more niche.
In fact the niche will become a niche.
Andy Mulholland
Chief Technology Officer and Divisional Director, Cap Gemini
Ernst & Young
Winners
2001 will be the year that directories become understood as
being a pivotal technology in managing the provision of
'e'-services. Microsoft will be in a position to get Active
Directory established as the way to manage internal e service
processes, Sun will be pushing the role of the directory in the I
Planet suite for external market makers, and Novell will be there
as the biggest and most scalable version of LDAP to act as a
unifying directory for the Redhat Linux e-service providers. You
cannot ignore this topic when all the major players are pushing it
as the key to their e service technology visions! Logistics and
fulfilment will be the two services that will move into the
limelight as serious real time based transaction capabilities move
towards requiring real time physical transaction deliveries. Old
players and new players are offering end-to-end management of the
supply chain to supply'net' as it has become known with event
triggers and optimisation of any activity to provide real time
knowledge and management of this hither to'out of sight' important
service activity.
Losers
The importance of the web server and html in particular is
diminishing for several reasons. Firstly the activity and the focus
has moved to the transaction rather then the content, and secondly,
new tools are making website creation and management a routine
activity.
This shift in focus and importance together with the impact of
new tools to ease use is making inroads into the traditional
firewall. The filter management of activity becomes increasingly
important and the tools, techniques and process become the real
issue. And while the basic firewall with its relatively crude
techniques for control remains effective, it is not really the tool
for go-ahead e-service businesses looking to offer widespread use
of complex value chains and services.
The process of managing the entire process in depth is
introducing new products and requiring more complex and demanding
skills to engineer process filtration and management
John Williams
Head of video practice, Citria
Winners
Placing broadcast material on the Web as streaming media in
itself does not represent a media revolution. The true power of
streaming media is only realised when the user experience becomes
interactive - searching for specific sections of video to watch and
linking streaming video to other Web content.
There is still confusion about the role of digital asset
management solutions in online applications and how this fits with
Web content management. Now we can expect it to join the standard
shopping list of technologies for large-scale media-rich
services.
Loser
Britain is about to find out exactly what happens when you share
512Kbits between 50 people - as planned for the BT's home ADSL
service. This is unlikely to represent the broadband solution we
have all been hoping for but other access methods will be close
behind and we will see high-speed home Internet connections become
a reality before long.
Thomas Nikolopulos
Director Breakaway Solutions UK and Ireland
Winners
The crash of the B2C market earlier this year saw the focus of
the new economy shift to B2B companies. 2000 has also seen an
increase in companies looking to use the Internet to strengthen
their business models. However, finding the time or the skills to
do this can prove problematic. ASPs and application hosting have
been the hot topics of the final two quarters of 2000. Is this the
new way to do business, by outsourcing your support? Is this the
way forward in 2001? But there will certainly be consolidation in
this sector during 2001. Gartner Group estimate that by the end of
2001 up to 80% of all ASPs will disappear.
Value add will be essential as standard hosting costs come down,
exchanges consolidate, the number of dotcom start-ups slows and the
more cautious bricks and mortar firms take a closer look at
e-business solutions, with higher demands and value for money.
Losers
As competition becomes more fierce amongst fewer players, the
winners will be those who bring most to the deal. The losers will
be those who fail to predict market developments and those who fail
to react swiftly enough.
John Dillon
Director of marketing EMEA, Extricity
Winners
Industries will increasingly look beyond the technology
standards to define and standardise the best practices in their
relationships with business partners as they take them on line.
Such standards jump-start collaboration, bypassing the need to
negotiate and agree on how individual tasks should be done.
RosettaNet, a non-profit industry consortium has pioneered such
standards in the electronics, IT and semi-conductor sectors. Their
Partner Interface Processes (PIPs)have been widely accepted within
these communities promoting high adoption of
B2Be-collaboration.
Just as companies have achieved efficiencies from integrating
all the applications of their internal systems over the last 10-15
years, they will in the future see a huge return on IT budget
investment from improving how well a company works with it's
external partners and subsidiaries. There will be a far greater
need for collaboration between companies on the design,
implementation and on-going maintenance of B2B solutions. Such B2B
collaboration will only happen if there is a clear business benefit
for all parties. Applying traditional IT project development
methodologies simply won't work for B2B.
Losers
Replacing out-dated modes of data communications (phone, fax,
e-mail, EDI) with equivalent XML based internet data connections
only solves part of the problem. It does not truly link companies
into a managed and automated business collaboration.
Following such a strategy will still require manual process
co-ordination and severely impact operational effectiveness.
Companies tend to over reach with a desire to roll out an
end-to-end solution that covers both internal and external
processes.
The key to successful roll out will be low technology and
investment barriers leaving room to entice partners that want to
collaborate. It has to be easy and cheap to start, with the
capacity to build tighter integration overtime, in line with
demonstrated business value.
In addition, any attempts to mandate how partners in a community
will have to work, and what internal business processes they must
use will fail. It must be recognised and accepted that internal
operations and processes will continue to be an important way for
companies to differentiate themselves.