Strategies for crossing the next tech frontier

By ADAM GIFFORD

Firms working out their future IT strategy should consider six technologies which research firm Forrester thinks will have a big business impact.

They are extended internet, web services, organic internet, dynamic collaboration with partners, adaptive supply networks and scenario design.

In a stopover in Auckland last week, research director John McCarthy said the extended internet was not linking computers to the internet but linking the physical world with the virtual world using wireless and cheap computing technologies.

"That means having the ability to manage the contents of a big shipping container as it comes into Auckland and know what is in it or if it has been tampered with," said McCarthy.

He said web services were about taking a more rational, standardised approach to application integration.

Already 120 firms had signed up to the Web Services Interoperability Group, and industry giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Sun were working to ensure a common set of tools emerged.

Many firms were using the development of employee portals as a relatively low-risk way to start working with web services, because they were a way to integrate a lot of different content and systems.

"A lot of companies will want to do what Microsoft has done internally. Microsoft's sales managers don't have to go to Siebel to get information, it all comes to them in Excel," said McCarthy.

Web services at the integration layer was one of four technologies Forrester bundles together as "organic IT", which allowed companies to build a much more easily manageable infrastructure out of cheap components.

The second technology, "fabric computing", was emerging from companies which started in the web-hosting business.

"These guys built a lot of software to manage these huge farms of servers to basically hide the complexity of that environment behind one management interface," said McCarthy.

"This is about how you configure server capacity and bring it on line quickly."

A similar approach drove the third element of organic IT, sharing or pooling storage.

"There is a lot of software innovation around SANs [storage area networks] - for example, the stuff EMC is doing with its Auto IS software, where you can just attach a new storage box to the network and the software will automatically configure it and balance it.

"Lastly there is what we call RAIL, redundant array of internet links, which is the combination of new VPN [virtual private network] hardware from Cisco and these route optimisation boxes from people like Sockeye Network and Route Sciences.

"Instead of buying one big, fat Telecom New Zealand pipe, you buy multiple cheap pipes and treat that as if it was one aggregated pipe.

"We think each of these technologies individually will help companies lower management costs and utilisation costs, because at the moment utilisation is somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 per cent in the case of storage."

Cheaper integration technology meant organisations could build collaborative relationships with a wider range of suppliers and partners.

"Too much of what's going on today is still the old, serial structure of a static, rigid chain. That is not what you need. You need a network to survive."

The sixth technology, scenario design, is aimed to improve service to customers.

"You have these large retail sites with millions of visitors where they expect a conversion rate [of visitors to sales] of less than 3 per cent.

"That is analogous to Napoleon's march on Moscow, where he started off with a million troops and ended up with 17,000.

"The numbers these guys are satisfied with are, in military terms, epic disasters."

Scenario design aimed to answer three questions. Who are your customers? What are their goals? How do they accomplish those goals?

As an example of scenario design in action, McCarthy pointed to the revamped United Airlines site, where fare finding, flight status and frequent flyer tools have been put on the first page.