IDC predicts top tech for 2010 IT recovery

>> Speaker one: Hello, I'm Sam Diaz for ZDNet. 2010 is underway, and analysis firm IDC is predicting a small recovery for the IT and business technology industries for this coming year. So what are the big trends that will drive the recovery forward? Here to share a few technologies that he considers to be relevant is Frank Gens. He is the chief analyst with IDC. Frank, thanks for joining us today.

>> Speaker two: My pleasure.

>> Speaker one: So I read through your report and the ten predictions that you put out there for this year, but in particular I wanted to focus on a few that we found to be especially relevant. I want to start with mobile. What is it that you can tell us about the mobile landscape that will help drive IT recovery this year?

>> Speaker two: I think lots of people are focused on the platforms of our new devices like the Nexus One from Google. But I think the more important thing is going to be this excitement in the developer community to focus on these smartphones, these converged devices as really a prime client device for the enterprise really challenging the PC for the first time in 30 years.

>> Speaker one: So do you see any companies or technologies in particular that are really going to help drive and move things forward?

>> Speaker two: Well, it's pretty clear, Apple with the iPhone platform. They've got over 100,000 applications already written for that platform that contrast with tends of thousands for the PC. So you can see it is an order of magnitude difference already in the developer activity. And, of course, Google with the Android platform and now with the Nexus One, we've upped our forecast. We were predicting that it would be about 50 to 75,000 Android apps by the end of this year. With that nice, strong reference model now that Google's making in the Nexus One, we've upped that from 75 to 100,000. So a lot of developer activity for the clients; not for the PC, but for the smartphone, for the converged device.

>> Speaker one: Next up is the cloud. Now every year it's the same thing; the cloud, the cloud, the cloud. What makes 2010 different when it comes to the cloud and the recovery?

>> Speaker two: Well, really probably two things. One is we are going to look at a lot of the traditional IT players jumping in trying to make the cloud safe for enterprises. So a lot of offerings that are, you know, have a higher focus on security, on availability, that sort of thing. I think the other is we'll see a focus on what people are calling private clouds, and just recently HP and Microsoft made an announcement of a joint effort to deliver really cloud, private cloud appliances. And certainly that's what Oracle has got in mind I think as we look ahead in 2010 for its purchase of Sun. Let's see if we can package all the infrastructure right up to the applications, put it in kind of a simple to observe cloud model, and put it right on the customer's premises.

>> Speaker one: And are these the sort of things that you see that will help sort of drive some adoption?

>> Speaker two: Oh, absolutely. I think it's right now people are a little tentative particularly to traditional IT shops with putting a lot of their family jewels out on a public cloud. That'll diminish; because I think they'll learn it can be quite secure out there. But I think the private cloud will be a bit of a security blanket stage for these companies.

>> Speaker one: Finally, let's talk about business apps. Now any report you write, business applications will undergo a fundamental transformation. Using business applications with social slash collaboration software and analytics into a new generation of socialytic apps. Socialytics, explain to us what you mean by that?

>> Speaker two: Well, other than being a really awkward and clumsy name, so my apologies for that. It really just tries to capture this trend we've been seeing for a while. We think we'll accelerate in 2010 which is instead of the 30, last 20, 30 years of these very static kind of built in concrete business applications that almost had no acknowledgment that they were human beings at the end or in front of the application, now with social software and collaborative software being able to generate a lot of interesting new ideas and insights and communication at the front-end. So connecting that end to these business apps, and then at the backend being able to analyze all that new, large base of information from the social apps with analytical software. So really instead of just the core app front ended with collaboration tools for people and then at the back end, let's analyze that information.

>> Speaker one: Can you give us some examples of companies and what they're doing in this space?

>> Speaker two: Well, certainly I think just in the cloud we were just talking about that sales force dot com with chatter. You know, this is becoming if you're in the application business, you have to have social front-end on the front of that. I think we've been seeing for a few years now Microsoft building out the SharePoint platform is really a broader platform for Windows applications. And IBM with the Lotus environment. And then you've got startups out of the social software world like Jive Intelligent, you know, who may in fact be startups. They're trying to create their own platform. So we'll see. The success will be which of those can get the most developers, and I think the ones that support more of a mash up style of development rather than an old style will be the ones who have the edge.

>> Speaker one: Frank, thank you for joining us here today.

>> Speaker two: My pleasure, Sam.

>> Speaker one: I've been speaking with Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC. For ZDNet, I'm Sam Diaz. Thanks for watching.

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