The Hindu Business Line : `New tech trends can touch every aspect of life'

"NANOTECHNOLOGY has the potential to touch every aspect of our life. It is increasingly finding applications in many a field, more so in medicine," said Mr D. Raghuram, Vice-President, Technology Enterprises Solutions, Ramco Systems Ltd, Chennai, to MBA and MCA students of St. Peter's Engineering College, Avadi, at a meeting held under the aegis of BL Club.

Elaborating on `Technology Trends for 2006 and Beyond' after inaugurating the BL Club at the college, he said radio frequency identification (RFID), open source software (OSS), nanotechnology; voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), service oriental architecture (SOA) and utility computing are the technologies likely to do well in the future.

RFID technology can help businesses optimise the supply chain, generate higher revenue and reduce costs and improve item management. It helps accelerate new product introduction. It is small enough, fast enough and cheap enough to do real work with today. It finds use in many segments. It involves paper-thin labels consisting of an integrated chip, integrated antennae and two varieties of tags, passive and active, with battery. RFID makes processes non-intrusive and saves time. It is being hailed as a sunrise industry. Seventy-five per cent of tech start-ups use OSS as foundation technology. Mr Raghuram said, "Microsoft is eyeing open source. IBM, Sun MicroSystems and Google are proponents of open source." In addition, "open source community helps in improving the operating systems."

"Nanotechnology is the creation of functional material devices and systems through control of matter as an atomic or molecular state. It has the potential to touch every aspect of our life," he said.

Another technology that is revolutionising communications is VoIP , he said. Today more than 10 per cent of global voice traffic is over VoIP. VoIP is not new. It is used by most of us without realising it. It is just expanding into consumer markets now.

With the help of SOA, business functions will be able to work together. "Utility computing is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customers as and when needed and changes them based on usage rather than a flat rate," said Mr Raghuram.

With utility computing technology in place, organisations need not look for locations near electricity board stations nor have captive power stations.

The benefits of utility computing are that it is accountable, charges are low and there is sharing of resources. Here, IT services are purchased like a utility as and when needed and thus help to reduce the cost of IT operations.

Utility computing is also known as on-demand computing, automatic computing, service-based computing, organic computing and grid computing. It is reaching critical mass and will likely become the dominant approach for providing IT services.

Dr P. Nagarajan, Director, MBA Department, Prof S. Padmanabhan and other faculty members attended the talk.