TechReview
2009: A tech year
As the year 2010 begins, here's a roundup of the best technologies of the year 2009. We start with top strategic technologies that include: Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is all the rage. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Advanced analytics: This is a technology that's being helped along by increases in processing power. It involves giving businesses the ability to model every single action and create models. In security, for example, that could mean looking at patterns and detecting fraud as it happens. Client computing: This is being reshaped by virtualization, cloud technologies and new approaches to corporate IT in which companies provide employees with stipends to purchase their own systems and then give them the ability to access business applications through a virtualized environment. Green IT: This includes anything that reduces energy consumption and a company's carbon footprint. Reshaping the data center: This encompasses new approaches to data center operations, including a new way of designing them that involves building out facilities incrementally using pods and adding power, chillers and generators only as needed. Social computing: such as the business activities on Facebook and other networking venues. Security Activity Monitoring: A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity -- often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. Flash memory: This is faster and uses less energy than rotating disks. It costs more than a disk drive, but the price gap is narrowing. Virtualization for availability: VMware calls its entry in this arena VMotion; Microsoft calls its offering Live Migration. Recently InfoWorld gave the best of the year awards this year to some best products that they reviewed. Apple and Microsoft attained the maximum awards in different categories. Smartphone: Apple iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3G outrun cheaper competitors with free native code development tools, regular and major firmware updates, and the Application Store. NoteBook: Apple MacBook Pro. The notebook is drop- and crush-resistant, user-expandable, user-serviceable, and power efficient, with switchable low-power/high-performance graphics. Mobile Workstation: Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation. Its three-spindle configuration allows users to outfit the unit with both a two-disk RAID (a major advantage during disk-intensive tasks) and an integrated optical drive, while four DIMM slots support up to 16GB of RAM. Workstation: HP xw4600 Workstation. The xw4600 boasts unyielding performance, low cost, easy tune-up, and good expandability, save for being limited to a single quad-core processor. Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox 3. You can say that Google Chrome is the browser of future but Firefox is the king of today. Firefox 3 provides rich extensions and security with fastest browsing capabilities. Office Alternative: Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show. Zoho can give both personal productivity and business back-end applications, and with Google Gears, you can keep working on documents even if you can't find the Internet. Zoho is the only Microsoft Office alternative we know that you could simply use to run a complete business. It's also the only one that can run virtually all the Excel macros you might have developed. Database: Oracle Database 11g. Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, both had significant releases this year. Oracle Database 11g is richer in features and more configurable than SQL Server, giving skilled DBAs more powerful capabilities. Among the top new features, the killer combination of Active Data Guard and Real Application Testing make Oracle Database a winner DB. Data Integration Platform: Talend Open Studio. This platform boasts broad reach via Java and Web services, a highly distributed and scalable architecture, a library of connectors supporting a wealth of data sources, and a central metadata repository that encourages reuse. Mashup Server: Denodo Platform. Denodo provides a rich set of tools to unify both structured data from relational databases and unstructured data from Web sites, e-mail boxes, and other sources. A recording button helps simplify building code, while frequent "test" buttons help you debug as you go. Web Based Application Builder: Coghead. Coghead uses an Adobe Flex-based GUI for creating database-driven applications on the Web. The interface is very clean, the setup time is very fast, and minimal ASCII-based coding is required. Anyone can whip up a Web application by dragging and dropping some form widgets onto pages. Server Virtualization Platform: VMware Infrastructure 3. VMware underlined the supremacy of its VI3 platform with the cooperative release of ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 in 2008. Performance and scalability improvements, along with new features such as integrated capacity scheduling, patch managing, and live migration of virtual disks, filled important gaps and marked the advent of virtualization as the rule in datacenters. Cloud Platform: Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a great Cloud computing service with unlimited compute, storage, and communication amenities. The Amazon Relational Database Service makes it easier to set up, operate and scale relational databases in the cloud. New monitoring, auto scaling and elastic load balancing features for Amazon EC2 are also made available.
Compiled by: Nahid Akhter
Sources: Gartner, techtoggle.com
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