Charlie Bess,  HP Fellow, ISSIP VP –  In  the March Service Futures meeting of ISSIP, Ammar  Rayes, ISSIP President, and the Cloud Mobility SIG Chair,  presented his perspective on the technology trends that will be shaping our approach to addressing business problems. During the discussion I realized we may be passing through a threshold without even knowing it.

The Y axis  – IT % of GDP

Each generation of technology in the IT space seems to last somewhere between 16 and 20 years.

The first generation of computing was described as the mainframe era. Data was scarce and computing time was even scarcer. The operating system and 3rd generation languages were the killer application of this age. There really wasn’t any networking. It ran from 1956-1976.

The 2nd generation was when the personal computer came on the scene. Data was still relatively scarce but computing was more available. We began to have a personal view of our data. Networking also arrived. This era ran from about 1976-1992. The killer application was the spreadsheet.

The 3rd generation was focused more on network computing. The various systems were tied more tightly together, TCP/IP was accessible everywhere. Data moved around but remainedrelational in order to be useful.  The browser was the killer application and this era ran from about 1992-2008.
Now we have entered into a new age. The age of IT everywhere with machine to machine,sensors and contextual awareness. We’ve moved beyond mobile being a simple extension to the backend of the enterprise into being the real interface for most interactions. Organizations consume on structured data to a large extent, but have found new ways to tease structure out of what used to be unstructured and unusable. Efforts in the machine-to-machine space will likely be the killer application, but I’m not sure what it will be. Based on previous performance we’ll be in this wave until 2024.

What is interesting though is that in every case, the way we viewed computing at the beginning of the wave vs. the mid-point was very different. The .com era of the 3rd generation is a perfect example. Once we moved past the turn of the century into 2001, everything started to look different. The mid-point for this wave is 3 years away and closing fast.

If you would like to be part of discussions like this please drop me,  Charlie Bess,  a line so that you can receive an invite to the Service Futures SIG. The presentation and the recording are housed in the ISSIP Gdrive in the SIG area and available to SIG members. If you would like to become even more involved, we are looking for a Vice-Chairperson of the SIG, since there is more future ahead of us than any one person can attempt to coordinate.