Where will IT be in 2015?

You're ready to tackle the IT challenges of the next year, but what's going to happen in the longer term? Researchers foresee the technology in 2015 and Technobyte takes a look!

By Mary Branscombe

Hydrogen buses, robot-driven tanks, automatic speed control in your car talking to intelligent traffic systems and cross-rail might finally be taking commuters to work. Technology will have changed a lot by 2015, and business technology will have changed with it.

IT will be powering business and providing competitive advantage but the really successful businesses will be the ones where IT doesn't come from an IT team.

If you're getting a job in 2015 at the age of 21, you will have been using the web and instant messaging since you could first read text on screen, so the way you work will be different from people who grew up with newspapers and handwritten letters. And because you're happier working in a coffee bar than at a desk, you might never squeeze onto a crowded hydrogen bus or into a cross-rail carriage. The barriers between home and work will carry on breaking down.

"In 2015, we won't see the end of spam and other attacks," says Graham Cluley of Sophos, "because fundamentally it's not a technology problem. The sad truth is that the weak link is the human element. Humans can't be upgraded like operating systems, or download patches, and will continue to make mistakes in 2015. Indeed, threats like identity theft and fraud will still be occurring hundreds of years into the future because of human mistakes."

But we will have security that's a long way from passwords and firewalls, according to Henrik Kiertzner, Associate Director for Security and Risk Consulting, Arup. "We'll see the death of in-house IT security. There is no way of protecting your data from the key-ring multi-TB data stick, there is no way of preventing access by the really determined across firewalls; hence, we'll have private spaces with no external interfaces, tightly locked down, for truly confidential information. Some private spaces will be shared between communities of interest, and they'll be invisible to the unauthorised. Instead of passwords we'll have device and message-level encryption and security with more or less real-time decryption and very robust authentication structures, biometrically-based."

Never enough bandwidth

More mobile users, more collaboration, identity services, software as a service; network demand is set to increase significantly. Email volumes will carry on increasing, but other forms of communication will grow too.

"People under 25 don't send email, they text or IM," says Peter Glock, Head of Solutions Development, Orange Business Services.

Voice will still be significant, but most of it will be VOIP and much of that will be on mobile networks. According to telecoms research company analysis, nearly a quarter of all fixed and mobile calls will go over mobile VOIP by 2015; these will be premium services that include presence information and the ability to send instant messages and multimedia as part of a voice conversation.

Voice will also be an interface both to devices and to network services, believes Alistair McKinnon, Senior Product Manager for IP Multimedia, NTL Telewest Business. "We already have speech recognition for dialling numbers in companies and on some mobile phones, but by 2015 this will become far more like talking and listening to a human. It will be the norm for speech to be used as a control for all forms of man/machine interface in the home controlling the TV, video, lights and the heating and in the office voice will control the PC, PDA and mobile."

Voice recognition might happen on the device, but there will be network services like real-time language translation, he said. "You'll have natural speech recognition, translation and synthesis into the target language and this could be packaged into a Bluetooth-style earpiece."

Social networks will be used for finding experts and colleagues within business, and for sharing information automatically. They may also help with what Arup's Kiertzner calls "the massive handicap of a basically post-literate population, largely unable to express selves verbally."

The 2015 equivalent of emoticons will try to convey tone and emotional content, perhaps with animated avatars of your face showing your mood and he suggests virtual worlds could move from entertainment to business and training tools.

A considerable increase in business use of video will contribute to the 15 exabytes of data a month. Video will become one of the standard ways of communicating information within the business for visualising data sets, for training and for collaboration, with high definition video conferencing and tele-presence.

Business users will be expecting high definition video at work, because they'll be used to it at home. Consumer technology will mean more experienced users but it will also set expectations. Laptop screens won't be enough for the video people will be using; Neilds believes that the 50" plasma screen, projector or active wallpaper that will be common in the home will reach the office, too.

By then, the processors in one's PC will have many cores, some of them running standard PC programmes the way a dual-core CPU does today, but the others will be dedicated cores for networking, VOIP, media processing, 3D graphics rendering, physics processing, handwriting and speech recognition, XML processing, security and reliability scanning, encryption accelerators and other specialised functions.

Expect fewer cores for desktop and mobile systems and far more on the server. There will be a gigabyte or more memory on the chip, acting as system memory and cache as necessary. Another billion transistors in the CPU do nothing but manage the rest of the chip to detect hardware failures and shift the work to another core. The first optical interconnects within the chip speed this up.

The first indium antimonide transistors will be available in 2015, using a tenth of the power of transistors in 2008, but they won't have changed the power equation yet. A CPU will still use around 100W of power but with each core only getting a few watts. More cores won't speed up existing applications the way faster processors have done for years so software development will have to shift from single threaded applications and memory locks to speculative multi-threading and message passing.

IT is going to be a commodity, it will be seen like a light switch, like a sealed off box you can't get into it.

--www.itpro.co.uk