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The well known research firm Gartner just published it’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations ans Users for 2010 and beyond, covering developments which definitely affect the RIA market, too. Their key findings are:

• IT Ownership: ”By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets”.
• Cloud Computing: “By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators”.
• Social Networking: “By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization”.
• Sustainability: ”By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs”.
• Internet Marketing “will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide”.
• Mobile Commerce: “By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically”.
• Context Aware Computing “will be as influential to mobile consumer services [..] as search engines are to the Web”.
• User Devices: “By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide”.

Perhaps the most aggressive outlook is the prediction that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013 — Morgan Stanley wasn’t quite that courageous. If we look closely, Gartner predicts that mobile phones will drive the higher number of website accesses “due to the sheer weight of device numbers”, but the “the bulk of page views will continue to occur through larger-format devices”. However: The RIA sector has to get ready for the mobile revolution, existing websites and web-based applications should be designed to be device-independent and their information structure has to be redesigned for mobile phone access.

CanooNet Mobile V2 (announced for 2/2010) demonstrates a successful redesign of a content structure for mobile access: No information should be positioned more than 3 clicks away from the user.

Session title: Metering the Cloud, applying ABC from code profiling up to performance cost management of cloud computing
Speaker: William Louth, JINSPIRED

To quote Monty Python: And now for something complete different.

William correctly notes that ABC is an accepted accounting practice.

Novel: A movie excerpt (THX1138). In the portrayed world every activity has a budget. (The chase ends when the chaser’s budget runs out.) William claims that the cloud will operate in an analogous manner to this world. Business will demand a breakdown of the activities which result in a given total cost. They will do this so they can subsequently optimize their resource usage and reduce costs.

The speaker describes (and seemingly accepts) the assumption that the lower the cost, the higher the efficiency. For example, if I can identify that my persistence costs are high I may choose an alternative persistence provider.

Blogger thinks: What a horrible world this would be, where cost becomes the sole consideration at the expense of all other quality attributes. What about uptime, response time, throughput? But come to think of it: Isn’t this how companies have been thinking ever since the bubble burst!? For that matter maybe this is how businesses have been thinking since the invention of Taylorism.

Continues… billing will be required on various levels: Across groups and aggregated services.

The Jinspired product “Probes” enables the monitoring of high-level entities e.g. user, house, washing machine etc. as opposed to simply methods, which is what most probing software focusses on. AspectJ is used to inject probes into code.

The Probes API is attempting to become a JSR. It’s certainly an incredibly powerful idea. It permits metering at various levels, groups and aggregated entities.

Summary
This whole business of costing everything and billing accordingly will likely appeal to today’s business mindset.
However, I (and I’m not alone) view ABC as a disastrous approach to improving the efficiency of the organization. This is not just because quality comprises a multitude of attributes (cost being just one of them), but – more fundamentally – because it turns out that organizational efficiency (the cloud, which forms part of the organization) is not in fact maximized by maximizing the efficiency of each individual element involved.

Counter-intuitive though it is, the quality and quantity of what your organization produces (products, services) is actually determined by a handful of constraints (bottlenecks.) ABC does not only not recognize this fact, it guarantees that quality and quantity will be less than their potential for a given set of resources. For more information read this.