What the Smart Organisation will be wearing in 2006 (page 2 of 2)

Hot-pluggable is part of the overall trend towards standards-based interoperability and in 2006.

Grid Computing grows up

Grid computing is coming of age, as seen in the latest Oracle Grid Index with Europe scoring 5.1 on a scale of 10. The adoption of Enterprise Grid Computing to fully utilise under-used server capacity is growing and it will approach mainstream status in 2006.

And again, going Grid can be achieved without much effort. Oracle Database 10g dynamically allocates processing power and storage space where it's needed most. Thanks to a greater understanding and acceptance of how today's virtualisation technologies and service oriented architectures can help create a more flexible infrastructure, companies are realising that effectiveness and efficiencies can be obtained by underpinning this with Grid. Grid is moving rapidly from the niche scientific and financial areas to more mainstream clusters.

Packages, People, Plants

Sensor-based technology spreads its vibes
RFID (radio frequency identification) is part of the 'pervasive' technologies that saw a veritable explosion of growth in 2005. Today, it's chips with everything.

Leading companies of all sizes are deploying sensor technologies to track assets and automatically detect changes in temperature, motion, location, and other physical conditions. The real benefits kick in when sensor data is fully integrated with enterprise applications-such as inventory management, warehousing, and manufacturing systems to deliver real-time business intelligence.

And RFID is moving beyond commercial applications. For example, mobile sensor devices can be implanted into patients to enable doctors to monitor chronic conditions minute-by-minute from miles away. The sensors detect tiny changes in metabolism and transmit data, via a mobile phone, to the patient's doctor.

Other pilot projects include the identification and localisation of people in the operating theatre; the tracking and tracing operating theatre materials, such as implants, and of blood products using temperature-sensitive RFID tags. This will enable compliance with the legal requirements relating to implant traceability and it will also aid compliance with standards relating to the traceability and quality of transfusion blood bags.

It's all Semantics

One trend that will come to fruition over the next five years is semantics technology. The Semantic Web aims to create a universal medium for information exchange among machines. Sometimes referred to as master data management (MDM), IDC predicts that this market will grow to $10.4 billion by 2009.

MDM aims to give businesses a single, accurate view of customers, partners or suppliers, by drawing data from separate stores of data scattered across an enterprise. Again, common standards-based technologies are key in making this happen.

Overall, for 2006 the key trend is towards making enterprise IT simpler and cost-efficient - through consolidated, integrated solutions; dynamic storage sharing; and real-time information from sensor-based chips.

At the heart of this is interoperability - something that technologists have been striving to achieve for years. But today, with Oracle's hot-pluggable architecture, 2006 seems set to be the year that it all comes together.