Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond

Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond

1. By 2015, a G20 nation's critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.
2. By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most new Global 2000 CIOs.
3. By 2015, information-smart businesses will increase recognized IT spending per head by 60 percent.
4. By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT services.
5. By 2015, 20 percent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
6. By 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
7. By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
8. By 2015, 10 percent of your online "friends" will be nonhuman.

These were selected from more than 100 of the strongest Gartner predictions across all research areas  submitted for consideration this year. This year's selection process included evaluating several criteria that define a top prediction. The issues examined included relevance, impact and audience appeal.

Additional details are in the Gartner report "Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2011 and Beyond: IT's Growing Transparency"  (you will need to register at the Gartner site)

Do you agree with these? Do you have some predictions of your own which you think need to be added to the list? Let's do some crystal ball gazing of our own........

Cytotron: Exciting New Development

One of the most popular posts on my blog has been Cytotron : A cure for Arthritis ?? . Many have wondered when would this pathbreaking technology become mainstream and be available in the US.

Now there's some exciting news on that front:  "The CYTOTRON  is a Rotational Field Quantum Magnetic Resonance device to treat cancer and improve drug targeting and delivery... Shréis Scalene Sciences LLC, an Organization de Scalene member company, today announced that it has been awarded a cash grant of about a quarter million USD, under the U.S. Government’s Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project (“QTDP”) program, for 2010 "

The grant has been awarded to Shréis Scalene Sciences LLC (USA) to use "the CYTOTRON, as a stand-alone device utilizing Rotational Field Quantum Magnetic Resonance (RFQMR) to treat cancer and improve drug targeting and delivery through nano-permeabilization”.

The device uses Rotational Field Quantum Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (RFQMR) to deliver highly complex quantum (packet switched) beams in radiofrequency (RF) bands and harmonics ranging up to 300MHz in the presence of high instantaneous magnetic fields between 1mT to 6T, with specialized near field parabolic antennae.

Despite the wide array of prevailing therapies covering the entire range of the EM spectrum - from minimally invasive (thermal) RF ablation to complex ionizing radiation/prohibitive proton beam therapies - there is no stand alone, whole body, multi-organ suitable therapeutic device on the market today.

The CYTOTRON uniquely combines RF with instantaneous NMR, to safely yet effectively perform in vivo multi organ tissue engineering, with minimal/no collateral damage. A clinical trial was also registered with clinicaltrials.gov (NCT01220830) using the CYTOTRON to treat Multiple Sclerosis. The trial is ongoing at the S-CARD campus in Bangalore.

An international patent application filed by the inventor Dr. Rajah Vijay Kumar, for the use of a Cytotron application called Focused Resonance Nano-permeabilization (FORN) has been recently published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Evidence exists that FORN can be combined with chemotherapy, using it as a "drug focusing and delivery tool" to non-invasively target intractable, impervious lesions, helping to reduce systemic toxicities and improve therapeutic windows.

Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia (PA) has issued a letter of intent to conduct a clinical trial using the Cytotron in brain cancer. Early interest was received from the Center for Prostate Disease Research-WRAMC for the use of the Cytotron to treat prostate cancer. SSS executives are confident that the award of the prestigious QTDP grant will open up more doors to make the device and the treatment available in multiple medical institutions nationwide.

Read more details at : Shréis Scalene awarded Federal QTDP grant to advance use of the CYTOTRON

Future of the Web: A web visionary speaks

Came across this interesting and informative presentation ("Ten Questions Internet Execs should ask and answer")  by Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley M.D.; delivered at the Web 2.0 Summit at San Francisco on Nov 16, 2010.


Meeker is head of the firm's global technology research unit (Latest Update 11/30: A Onetime 'Queen of the Net' Heads to Silicon Valley : Meeker moves to Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner) . She has been called "Queen of the Net" by Barron's and was named "one of the ten smartest people in tech" by "Fortune" magazine in 2010. Her prognostications about the state and future of the Internet are much awaited and respected. Meeker helps set the tech agenda in her annual state of the Internet address at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The 10 questions Meeker asks and answers are:

1. Globality
   Do you know which players in which countries do what you do better (or at least differently) than you do? Do you study / implement it?
2. Mobile
   Ramping faster than any ‘new new thing’ – is your business leading or lagging?
3. Social Ecosystems
   Would you rather be Apple, Google or…Facebook?
   Will their future directions help / hurt your business?
4. Advertising
   Ripe for innovation – will your business benefit?
5. Commerce
   ’Wal-Mart in your pocket’…location-based services…group buying power…flash sales… deep discounts…transparent pricing…real-time alerts / ratings…virtual goods...immediate gratification… Products must be fast + easy + fun.
   Have you ever seen ‘constant improvement’ in products like we are seeing now? Is your business keeping pace?
   Do humans want everything to be like a game?
6. Media
   What does the extraordinary ramp in on-demand video usage mean for your business?
7. Internet Company Leadership Evolution
   Shocking changes over just 6 years… are you prepared for next half decade of change?
8. Steve Jobs
   What’s his ‘secret sauce?’ Does your company have it?
9. Ferocious Pace of Change - What’s Next in Tech?
   When do consumers / enterprises & incumbents / attackers need you?
10. Closing Thoughts –
    Large companies do not typically support rapid growth rates of the magnitude that follow… will these trends continue? 

Food for thought!...not exactly what you needed as you visualize the food laden platters for Thanksgiving.


Happy Thanksgiving!

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 19: SAS vs. Cognos or is it SAS & Cognos??

Comparison of user feedback on the two tools for various parameters (compiled from various sources)

Companies with big data crunching groups often end up with a conundrum related to tool selection esp. when making a choice between SAS and Cognos 8. My thoughts on the issue: 

• Issue boils down to Predictive Analytics vs. Descriptive Analytics with each tool a powerhouse in their respective sphere 

• Both can coexist. Rather than it becoming a "SAS vs. Cognos" scenario it can be "SAS and Cognos".

(A scenario which exists at some players: Generally, Cognos used as a data presentation layer that includes descriptive statistics and OLAP. SAS having a substantially more powerful ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capability, used for data prep processes. Finally, SAS handles the inferential statistics and data mining, including predictive and optimization modeling.

To summarize, SAS used to integrate and perform ETL  on data, Cognos to present the data, then SAS to analytically crunch the data.

The analytical results may then be reported back through Cognos. This whole process can be made to feel seamless. 

Potentially some of the same synergy can be realized by a Cognos-SPSS combination.) 

• Release of Cognos 10 and integration of Cognos-SPSS makes the comparison more difficult as SPSS adds the predictive/statistical analyses capabilities which Cognos was weaker in. On other hand the SAS - Enterprise Guide provides a very analytical user friendly front-end

How have you dealt with your Predictive Analytics vs. Descriptive Analytics dilemma ? Peaceful co-existence or daggers drawn ? 

Ancient Indian Mathematics ; and the World Wide Web running out of IP addresses

Modern technologists have shown a remarkable lack of vision when envisaging the potential scope and spread of their innovations especially when dealing with numbers. Y2K, D10K etc, were manifestations of this malaise and now we come across the latest - the Internet may be in a danger of shut down as it runs out of IP addresses ("It sounds far-fetched, but a crisis with the potential to close off the Internet is imminent.").


How will my refrigerator talk to my toaster then? A big reason for running out of IP addresses is that almost every household device is Internet compatible now and has a unique IP address associated with it.


Juxtapose this against the logic of mathematicians of ancient India who had names for numbers as large as 10 to the power 17, yes 17


10 power 0      Eka
10 power 1      Dashah 
10 power 2      Shata
10 power 3      Sahasra
10 power 4      Ayuta
10 power 5      Laksha
10 power 6      Prayuta
10 power 7      Koti
10 power 8      Arbuda
10 power 9      Abja
10 power 10    Kharva
10 power 11    Nikharva
10 power 12    Mahapadma
10 power 13    Shankha
10 power 14    Jaladhi
10 power 15    Antya
10 power 16    Madhya
10 power 17    ParArdha.


Why? as early as 1st Century B.C.E. (perhaps even earlier) would they be wrapping their arms around such huge numbers baffles the imagination. 


The reasons were often mundane but can be well appreciated - like a prayer from Krishna Yajur Veda (4th Khanda, 4th Prashna)- a prayer and a wish for the wealth of cows to abound in large numbers, like millions and millions.  The counting of cows here goes by  hundreds, thousands, and thousands and millions of hundreds.


Now one can get an idea about the roots of a sense of exactitude even when things are nebulous - no , it's not God give me lots of cows but God give me a ParArdha cows!! ("..........parArdhashcemAme agna ishTakA dhenavassantu." - sanskrit)


So ye Gods of the Internet (aka "American Registry for Internet Numbers") move soon from the antiquated IP address of the type 74.125.227.19 (system offering roughly 4.3 billion possible IP addresses) to the the ones which look like fe80:43e3:9095:02e5:0216:cbff:feb2:7474 (offering 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses......that should make the "cow counters" happy). In techspeak move from IPv4 to IPv6.


Now let me go back to counting sheep....or is it cows..sheep...cows...sheep.....zzzzz

Useful Resource: IPv4 / IPv6: The Bottom Line

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 18 : Lost (or Found?) in a Cloud

The Business Intelligence Chronicles in a Word Cloud

The Business Intelligence Chronicles in a Phrase Net

As I played with the new data visualization capabilities from IBM Research Labs (Many Eyes), I thought it would be nice to see how previous parts of The Business Intelligence Chronicles would appear in a Word Cloud and Phrase Net. The results are above.

Many Eyes are Data visualization tools from IBM, currently described as an "experiment" from IBM Research and IBM Cognos software group. Site allows users to upload data and then produce graphic representations for others to view and comment upon.

Word Cloud Generator was first published by Jonathan Feinberg on wordle.net. It was designed to give pleasure, and not to provide reliable analytic insight. That said, many people have found unexpected uses for it, from presenting the "gist" of a text to displaying personal identity. Word Cloud Generator draws each word at a size proportional to its frequency.