2011 Predictions: It's Really Time for Real-Time

This year I decided to do things a bit different than past years. Before placing my first bet on this year’s prediction list, I decided to wait and listen to what ‘the experts’ were saying about 2011 technology trends. I expected iRobots and Google’s first moon flight, but no one seemed to raise the ante. What I heard was a lot of the same; cloud, BI, mobile, tablets, virtualization and more cloud. I hate to downplay their predictions but most of what I saw was just a recap of IT topics-of-the-moment. At the same time, I reviewed my predictions from last year and there ‘it’ was, lucky number 7:

“2010 becomes the ‘Realtime’ Year. Enterprises want their information as fast and as realtime as the Web. BI vendors struggle to get to anything close to realtime and begin telling customers they need to begin looking at other technologies for realtime data, such as Enterprise Mashups.”

I may have been a bit too early and a bit too specific, but I am confident this is one topic whose time has come. We continue to go to work and use ‘warehouses’ of information that are stale, disconnected copies of our actual live, dynamic data. That’s an old design from the 1990’s and one we no longer have to live with.

I believe in lucky number 7 so much that I am making it the focus of ALL of my predictions for 2011. I am calling this the “Real-Time Edge”: getting real-time information to the user by leveraging the computing power at the edge (tablets, mobile, sensors, etc).

So, here it goes, my top ten 2011 predictions in real-time. (Trust me, you haven’t heard any of these before):

1. "iClouds" join Apple's "iFamily." Apple announces the “iCloud” specifically designed for iPad real-time intelligence Apps.

2. Gartner and Forrester face off in lengthly legal battle. Gartner and Forrester both formally announce a new real-time BI niche called Real-time Intelligence (RI). Unfortunately, both companies have a very public legal battle over whether ‘real-time’ actually contains a hyphen.

3. BI lacks tradition. IDC puts out the first “Traditional BI Vendors doing Real-time Intelligence” point paper which interestingly enough doesn’t list any traditional BI vendors.

4. Amazon ditches the Kindle for Robots. Amazon and Willow Grove announce the world’s first real-time OpenCV (Computer Vision) cloud processing engines that can be used with personal iPhones, Android, camera-based tablets and even robots.

5. Oracle attempts Real-Time Real-Time. Larry Ellison mandates that all Oracle software products include “Real-time” in their name. This includes renaming the only product that already has “Real-time” in its name: “Oracle Real-Time, Real-Time Decision Server.” Sounds weird.

6. Google renames Groupon. On April 1, 2011, Google announces a $10B bid for the new real-time GroupOn who just renamed themselves “RealOn.”

7. SAP thinks they're sly, in Real-Time. SAP insists all their products have been real-time since day one. No one believes them.

8. Microsoft bets on "Real-Time Steve." Microsoft announces “Real-time SharePoint 2011” and touts that that every single SharePoint instance runs in memory, letting anyone find any data in any SharePoint instance within 2.4 milliseconds. Steve Ballmer renames himself “Real-Time Steve”.

9. The Cloud Confusion continues. Everyone else announces a real-time cloud offering and calls it the “Real Cloud”. Unfortunately, no one really knows what it is. Sorta like today’s Cloud.

10. I'm suffering from a mid-life crisis. I get a “Get Real-Time” tattoo.

I wanted to add more but my calendar says I have a real-time meeting with a real-time customer. Happy Real-Time New Year!