This just in: “It’s gonna get darker before it gets brighter.” Not my words, but a paraphrase of what analysts are commenting on the elusive resurgence of tech spending worldwide, as they continue to paint a gloomy picture of the tech revival. US high-tech companies by and large reported weak third-quarter earnings, in an overall climate of sluggish spending on technology among large corporates in the US and elsewhere. And if it wasn’t for the IT-enabled services sleight-of-hand, the Indian software industry too would have been staring at exports revenue growth of far smaller percentages than reported, also way below Nasscom projections of a couple of years ago.

The gloom still hangs heavily on the infotech industry, blurring clear vision and making it difficult to stay on that magical yellow brick road to revenues, returns and riches. So are we never going to have a thriving global tech industry ever again? Apparently, many Indian parents seem to (foolishly) think so, and are dissuading their children from studying for a career in IT—I hear that some computer science seats at engineering colleges and other premier institutions are going a-begging these days, something unthinkable a couple of years ago.

Like the Scarecrow in Oz these panicky parents haven’t got a brain (although, ironically, they do have the diplomas that the Wizard of Oz says you require to feel intelligent!). In fact it’s actually a no-brainer that the onward march of technology is inexorable, even if not as speedily as predicted. Businesses necessarily have to keep up with technological advances to keep the customer satisfied. The reasons for the slump and the ongoing sluggishness have their roots elsewhere.

George Colony, chairman and CEO of Forrester Research attributes it all to a tech overspend of $65 billion in the US alone, in the frenzy that lasted from 1998 to 2000 and amounted to over 20 percent of total spend in those years. Not only was it overspend, it was overspend on “naked technology” wherein it was impossible to get returns because the technology was deployed without changing the actual business process and organisation.

The result of naked technology deployment is almost always negative—it’s finally ended in top-management backlash, a credibility loss for IT, and the consequent technology recession. Forrester says tech spending won’t touch 2000 levels again till early 2004. Nevertheless, George Colony is quite convinced that it will be technology that will drive the economic recovery and recapture momentum, rather than the other way around.

In the future, as in the past, it’s “technology thunderstorms” that drive spending on—and usage of—new technologies. In effect these have occurred when ideas and their implementation have caught up with the steady processing power improvements over the years as envisaged in Moore’s Law—we’ve had thunderstorms at various stages in tech history: the minicomputer, the PC, the workstation, the Web. The question is, what’s the next one going to be? Forrester’s betting on three major changes: The X Internet, Web Services and Organic IT.

The current Web’s a killer app that’s made Internet usage almost universal, but once the initial euphoria of being on the Web has worn, people pretty much return to the real world for most activities, especially when the Web just replicates them. That’s set to change as we move increasingly into the X Internet—an Internet that’s executable and extended. Unlike the existing Web wherein the browser throws up essentially static pages of information, the executable Internet will enable a conversation between two ‘high IQ entities’ on either side, with interactivity rising to hitherto unforeseen levels as intelligent applications execute code on the user’s PC or other devices. This exists to some extent now, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The “other devices” form the extended Internet, and will be the connection to the real world. While today’s Internet has under 500 million users and a 100 million computers connected to it, the X Internet will push applications to embedded chips in a host of devices and consumer durables and increase the Internet population by billions of nodes. This, according to Forrester, will result in massive growth and opportunity—by 2010, the worldwide Internet devices and services market will increase to $2.7 trillion annually, from $600 billion annually today.

Simultaneously, Web Services and Organic IT will flourish. Web Services represents the machine-to-machine back-end connections that enable true business integration, by accelerating linkages to customers, suppliers and internal operating groups. And Organic IT creates a technology infrastructure that is adaptive, scalable and self-healing, combining high IT efficiency with high business value. The computing infrastructure will be based on inexpensive components that share and manage enterprise computing resources across all applications. This will involve a move towards more standardisation, and an open architecture; a move from HTML and EDI to Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) enabling communication between programs running on different operating systems, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries—in effect, a largely non-proprietary world.

The standardisation, simplicity and modularity brought about by Web Services and Organic IT augurs well for outsourcing and hosting, and will further popularise offshore development. That’s good news for the Indian software exports industry, which could well see its IT services model receiving a further boost from the new computing revolution.

Yes, as Colony says, “there will be a tomorrow in technology”; and yes, that’s good news for the Indian software industry, which seems quite happy to remain in Kansas. But as for me, I’m backing a horse of a different colour and waiting for that tomorrow when we crack the ‘IT for the masses’ conundrum on our own shores, and our IT industry finally discovers that there’s no place like home. Sadly, that dream is still elusively somewhere over the rainbow.

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com