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Rukmini Priyadarshini

What's the future likely to be on the software front, for embedded technologies and the Net? Some sagespeak on what's set to click and what's not.

TRACKING the future might be fun in science fiction, but when it comes to trends in technology, not everybody is willing to talk. But Prof Herbert Weber of the Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin, is willing to stick his neck out.

Prof Weber shares with eWorld some trends in the software industry. As Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST, Berlin, and full professor in Computer Science at Technical University Berlin, Prof Weber has led the Institute's consulting activities and been a thought leader on software engineering.

He talks about the move towards customised IT solutions as corporates evaluate the ever-burdened bottomline, is all praise for the embedded IT business, predicts doom for technology-driven businesses and says that even as the emergence of the Virtual Net makes the Internet larger than ever before, it caters to smaller and smaller communities. Here's more on each of these trends.

`Some software truths'

The software industry is now making the move from an emphasis on IT services to better products - and this is happening at a dramatic pace, says Prof Weber. There have been many cycles of cost reduction by corporates and software vendors are not sure what to offer these corporates.

Nobody has a clear vision on what products will enter the market and which will be successful. At the same time there is a stagnation in innovation that cannot continue for long, says Prof Weber.

"Corporate IT is shaky and uncertain. Corporates that have made investments in IT over the past couple of decades are reviewing their investments and that evaluation is leading to `renovations' and a reshuffle in the market,'' according to Weber.

That is, the more commoditised operations such as running call centres and SAP installations are being increasingly outsourced. This reshuffle could be called a division of labour between the in-house and the outsourced IT resources.

In the rush to outsource though, the likelihood of firms outsourcing too much is to be expected.

Once they realise they have outsourced too much, there will be an `insourcing' phenomenon - of those bits that were unjustifiedly outsourced. Weber says.

That will come after corporates have fully realised the enabling capability of IT, as they put in test patches of it to find what happens and what it can deliver.

New applications, are no guarantor of market success, says Weber. While corporate IT spending seems to have increased, it is also of better quality.

That is, corporates are being very careful about investing in new applications - which no longer have a guarantee of success in the market. Good services too are not enough for corporates.

Indian companies, for instance, must become an integrated part of the international market to determine the style of software engineering that is being deployed in other markets and focus on developing solutions tailor-made for customers.

The technologies for the future will be based more on equipment and solutions tailor-made for individual needs. `More individualised solutions that will serve customers better and better' is going to be the name of the game.

The next generation of applications will straddle different disciplines and cater to new needs. This opens an opportunity for more joint ventures between old economy and new economy companies.

Also of importance to Indian companies is the trend towards lowered margins in software and systems engineering space, while applications engineering will have larger margins, going forward.

Embedded is hot

Embedded IT is poised to be big business over the next decade. It is a big innovation boom, says Weber.

With tremendous possibilities in business- and life-critical applications, embedded software will also result in heightened quality and liability consciousness, says Prof Weber.

There will be zero tolerance for software failure. Embedded IT is the future, says Weber: "It is innovative, to the point, and can bring a lot of prosperity.''

Net trends

`Internet at call' is going to dominate the business landscape in the next few years. New applications, especially in the mobile domain, will result in an exploding number of opportunities. This phase and the industry will be similar in size and scope to the first Internet bubble, says Prof Weber because it is primarily technology-driven, where the market starts not with the demand side, but with the supply side. That the mobile applications bubble too will burst, can be expected, apparently.

However, "I do see interesting applications in business Internet use. The global Net is one thing but there are going to be many smaller local and specific Internets evolving, parallel to a shift in the dominance from the supply side to the demand side,'' says Weber. Indeed, it will not be the technologies that will dominate but those who develop business models that work. That is the factor determining long-term dominance in the market. "Technology-driven businesses have run up against the wall. They have not and will not recover.''

The Net of Nets or the Virtual Net will come to be a dominating force in the future. There will emerge smaller and smaller sub-communities where the Internet as we know it today will play a smaller role. In this ever larger and still smaller virtual Net, services, applications and information flow will be more to the point, says Weber.

Picture by Ramesh Kurup

priya@thehindu.co.in

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