Virtualisation and Green IT winners in 2009

Stan Beer
Monday, 17 November 2008 15:19

Science - Energy

The expected economic slowdown in 2009 will impact negatively on web-oriented architectures, social software and social networking, while cost saving technology, such as virtualisation  and green IT will flourish. This is the prediction of a technology research firm IBRS.

According to IBRS, the focus in the coming year will be on productivity increases, as well as cost savings and investments that must deliver. Consequently, technologies or applications like: web-oriented architectures, social software and social networking will stop and may not come back until 2010.

The research note from technology researchers Guy Cranswick, Kevin McIsaac and Joe Sweeney, predicts that economic slump will lead IT departments to avoid 'risky' or unproven technologies. Cloud computing, enterprise mashups, Web 2.0 and collaborative applications will be put into the 'too risky' basket. During 2009 IT managers and their finance colleagues will defer non-value-adding standards and concentrate on the core business, they say.

But IBRS also predicts that virtualisation will grow strongly next year because it delivers proven payback as it delays hardware purchases and enables IT to align infrastructure SLA to business demands more efficiently.

In keeping with Kevin McIsaac's log held view that the sun is setting on Sun Microsystems, he believes the economic downturn, coupled with the rise of Intel Virtualisation, will accelerate the transition from proprietary UNIX/RISC server to commodity Intel server for large workloads, thus hastening Sun Microsystems decline.

Green IT also gets the thumbs up from IBRS as it can be applied tactically to save power on desktops.