BANGALORE, INDIA: While everyone expects 2009 to be slow and cautious because of economic slow-down impacting investment and thereby slowing down the pace of technology change, history has proven that it is during the time of hardship most of the innovations take place. So, with this optimism I list down my predictions for top technology trends in 2009:

1. Usage of mobile devices for rich internet experience will accelerate - Higher adoption of Wi-Max and Wi-fi coupled with 3G will propel the use of mobile devices for rich internet experience - large file downloads, online high definition video, gaming software and many other killer apps will get more common place on mobile devices. Mobile devices will also get used more for social networking.

2. Green IT initiatives will remain in confused state - In 2009, lot of high visibility intent of adopting technologies that help the environment will be announced, but the actual action will still be lagging. Only a few very serious organizations will adopt measures such as server consolidation or virtualization keeping environment focus in mind - rest will adopt some smaller measures like informing their users to switch off computers while leaving office or use double sided printing with some going to the extent of using Black screen saver or Blackle instead of Google as search engine.

3. High performance computing will become more mainstream - High performance computing will move out of the domain of academia or government research departments. CIOs are going to give a serious thought on high performance computing and adopt more aggressively. However, availability of applications that will use high performance computing effectively will remain a challenge.

4. Cloud computing/software as a service/infrastructure as a service will gain momentum - 2009 will see lot more concrete action and success stories in this space. More organizations will be willing to adopt these types of services, but due to thin margin and large investment required in this business it will remain a challenging field for the platform/product vendors and service providers.

5. Applications targeted at smaller communities will gain momentum - More activities will happen in Hyper Local space. Innovation may come in the form of smaller apps focused at targeted communities offered as SaaS and combine that with online advertising and social networking.
  
6. Adoption of social software paradigm in enterprise environment - Increasing number of enterprises will adopt enterprise web 2.0 offerings and paradigm. Smart CIOs will innovate using social collaboration techniques to bring down their overall IT expenses.

7. Serious effort to dislodge Google supremacy will be mounted - More serious competitors will emerge to Google even in its core search engine business. Search engines will innovate fast to become analytics tool and also use concepts of semantic web. Many of the not so successful Google ventures will get lot of attention and Google chrome will continue to struggle against Microsoft Internet Explorer even in 2009.

8. Serious effort will be made to distil the wisdom of unstructured data - Power of data will be celebrated and respected with innovations in the field of making sense out of unstructured data.

9. Adoption of open source will accelerate - Adoption of open source will move from platform to software as organizations will look to cut costs. Organizations will offer more value added services around open source software.

10. Majority of the predictions will be proven wrong - As in any other year, majority of the technologies will not live upto the expectations and most of the predictions (including mine) will be proven wrong - and there lies the beauty of technology!