Firstly, may I wish you all a Happy New Year. I hope you all had an enjoyable holiday season and that the coldest winter in 30 years has not caused you too many early challenges.

Montal starts 2010 by expanding our operation in northern England. David Hendry, an experienced IT services commercial manager has joined us and will be based in Leeds. Those of you within the RSL sector may know David as he has worked within this area for several years. He will be introducing himself to many of you over the coming months.

Here at Montal, we keep a careful eye on developments within the IT sector to ensure that our products and services are not only in line with our customers’ existing requirements, but that they also move in line with the ever evolving trends within the IT world. As we ease into 2010, we would like to share some of these plans and concepts with you.

Gartner are the world’s leading IT research company. The annual Gartner Report has been released highlighting the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organisations in 2010. We all need to be aware of these and be ready to consider them as part of future IT strategy as the benefits are too significant to be ignored.

Below is a summary of the Gartner Top 10. Our Business Development Manager, Damian Reffin, ensures that Montal’s strategies are working alongside the current trends as well as researching into future technologies and concepts. If you would like to discuss any in more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us. It is our business to ensure that we have an expert you can talk to.

Colin Sales
Managing Director

Top 10 strategic trends for 2010

Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is the provision of IT services over the internet. Some extremely successful business applications can only be accessed in this way and our youth are spending most of their computing time using Cloud applications (e.g. Facebook, iPhone Apps). Using cloud solutions does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but it can take them off balance sheet and reduce others. Business continuity, compliance and data security are all benefits driving the popularity of this technology. (Also see this month’s feature entitled ‘More Cloud Forecasted for 2010’).

Advanced Analytics: Software applications that allow informed business decisions to be made using analytical information provided through applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. This information looks into the future and helps predict what can or will happen.

Virtualisation & Client Computing: The significant benefits that can be achieved from virtualising had a major impact on IT strategy in 2009. This will continue in 2010 bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. The choice of a particular PC hardware platform and OS platform becomes less critical. It provides a solution to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update and management and security plans.

Green IT: The use of IT, particularly among white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and home/teleworking.

Reshaping the Data Centre: Data centre costs can be lowered if large organisations adopt a pod-based approach to data centre construction and expansion. For example, if 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data centre, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a non-trivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

Social Computing: Blogs, email, instant messaging and social network services are all examples of social computing. They can play an important part in communication and bringing communities together, particularly within large organisations.

Security - Activity Monitoring: Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out. This has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before such as detecting malicious activity by authorised users or use of inappropriate web sites during working hours. Facebook, Twitter and iTunes are all now common examples of computer misuse which can commonly have significant impact on staff productivity.  

Flash Memory: Flash memory is not new, but it is becoming increasingly viable for corporate data storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100% annual growth rate during the next few years. It offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

Virtualisation for Availability: Virtualisation has been on the list already but new elements such as live migration for availability are being increasingly adopted. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual server while its operating system and other software continue to operate from a users prospective. If a server starts to fail, users can therefore continue to operate while work is carried out on the system during working hours - therefore an essential tool within business continuity strategy.

Mobile Applications: By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market. Once both office based PC’s and miniature mobile systems start sharing the same operating system, there will be a huge increase in mobile application availability.