developerWorks: This is a developerWorks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham with Irshad Raihan, worldwide market manager for Data Management at IBM®. Welcome back to the podcast, Irshan.

Raihan: Thanks Scott, good to be here.

developerWorks: Now, I wanted to talk with you about trends, looking forward into 2010. I'm wondering if you might start with kind of what do you expect to be an overarching or most important industry trend that you might be seeing in 2010?

Raihan: That's a great question, Scott. We've seen a lot of things happening and things are moving at an exponential rate. What would happen in a year now would probably happen across five years a decade ago, right?

developerWorks: Right.

Raihan: We're seeing a lot of different tech trends, but if I had to put my finger on the most significant one, I'd have to say that the role of the CIO in an organization — the changing role that we're seeing in terms of what, not just the CIO but the entire IT function within an organization — what it means and how central that is to the strategic decisionmaking in an organization.

The CIO has kind of broken into the clique of C-level executives if you will. Earlier, it used to be that IT was basically a budget guzzler, a necessary evil. You know, you've heard all the terms. But now IT's being thought of as an enabler of better business decision-making, and the CIO is much more involved in core decision-making at the top level.

Also, IT is now thought of as a cost saver, so it's almost a complete full circle, where from being something that takes up budget, it's now a way for companies to be able to save money because IT is now providing insights to our organizations that were not available before. That they can now use to make more informed decisions, smarter decisions -- to be much more competitive.

There's an interesting study that IBM conducted, listeners can find the report at ibm.com/ciostudy, and this was a survey of 2,500 CIOs from over 75 countries spanning 15 industries. And there is a lot of interesting insights that are coming out on the changing role of the CIO.

developerWorks: Now what about a big technology trend for 2010. What do you think there?

Raihan: Virtualization would be my pick. The actual technology that enables virtualization has been around a while. The idea of a virtualization manager, or hypervisor, sitting on top of hardware and then you can layer multiple operating systems that run individual applications that are made to believe that they have total control of that piece of machinery -- that's been around awhile.

What's changed in the last couple of years is the focus on reduced cost. Because companies now are starting to look to their servers and their desktops and their applications, saying "Well, we've got all this capacity just lying, doing nothing. Can we do something to improve utilizations?"

So virtualization has really taken off in 2009, and there are some interesting trends that we see in 2010, particularly around the dynamics of the industry and what's being delivered through a virtualized environment. For instance, open source applications are now becoming much more mainstream for virtualized environments. The idea of a hypervisor being part of the actual offer ... for instance, the Informix Virtual Appliance which basically is a self-contained, pre-configured virtual machine that has everything that you need for an Informix development environment. That's going to be a trend, that we see a lot of vendors offering virtual appliances.

Obviously, the technology around virtualization is going to get better. The consolidation ratios are going to get better, ROI's going to be -- you know, we're seeing companies breaking even within three months, so within six months, so, you know, that's going to get even better.

But we're also going to see a virtualization of more resources, from servers to storage to desktops. So that's one are we think virtualization's going to take a paradigm shift in 2010.

But in addition to virtualization in itself, I think what's important here is that virtualization is going to be an enabling technology for cloud computing. When you combine the idea of the application separated from infrastructure with the idea of server capacity as a price service (and applications available on demand on a subscription basis), you now have a very potent delivery model where basically your customers are able to pay as they go so they don't pay any maintenance fees, any capital costs. There's practically unlimited scalability and location independence. So virtualization being an enabler for cloud computing is going to be an important trend.

The other thing that we'll see is vendors adapting their applications to run as virtualized images. IBM actually has multiple cloud offerings and listeners can visit IBM.com/cloud for more information.

developerWorks: And the things that are going to be happening in the data-management space to support all this kind of at a summary level. What kind of things are you seeing there going into 2010?

Raihan: So again, data management is kind of the enablement framework that makes all this happen, so the biggest trend that we're going to see in 2010 is the partnerships that are going to emerge. There's going to be a lot of M&A activity [mergers and acquisitions]; there was already a lot in 2009. IBM, itself, acquired companies and we're seeing a lot of our competitors do the same. But there's also going to be cross-company partnerships.

We have a significant partnership with SAP. Let me give you another example. We talk about virtualization, so DB2® now is VMware-ready.

There's issues around sub-capacity licensing, for example. When you virtualize an environment and you're not using all the capacity -- you know, DB2 charges you for only how much you use but a lot of our competitors don't do that. So we see some of that dynamic in that industry, as well.

The other area that I think is going to be interesting is green. Customers have spoken, and it is an important issue for them. And green is interesting because I think in the last few years, we've been thinking about green as well; you know, data centers need to go green, and IT itself needs to go green, which is great. And that's another trend we're going to see in data manangement. A lot of technology, including data compression, virtualization, a lot of those technologies centered around reducing your infrastructure, reducing your footprint. And that's going to make a significant impact.

But also kind of the the reverse where IT, as I mentioned earlier, is now going to be able to give insight to organizations about how they can get more green. So it's -- as Gartner put it very succinctly: "Green for IT and IT for green." So it works both ways.

The other thing we're going to see in data management is the increased focus on data governance. And we've seen that every year we've talked about this, and there's only been increased attention given to this. We'll see a slew of products come out in that area. As far as IBM, I think the main trend that we're going to see is migration from other databases onto the IBM platform. And you know we've made it very easy for customers to migrate; we're actually providing them myriad technologies to reduce their costs and risk of migration.

developerWorks: Rounding the corner now and kind of looking down the home stretch, if you would, maybe a neat thing to close with here would be what's the top word that will feature prominently in 2010 in the IT world? If you could come up with that, what would you think it would be?

Raihan: Without a doubt, I would say "analytics." You know, data management (or information management) facilitates major change. The database itself remains important but the issue for customers is to focus on how to manage information holistically so they can anticipate change.

What business analytics does is it eliminates overload by making sense of the huge amounts of information that are now available within organizations. Analytics looks to use information to find patterns or new possibilities and make predictions and prescribe actions based on those possibilities.

So really, what you're doing is you're driving enterprises by intelligence rather than intuitions. And that gives organizations tremendous agility in executing decisions.

I think you interviewed Arvind Krishna at the Information on Demand Conference earlier this year and he talked about an information-led transformation. And that's interesting because, you know, as companies make small, rapid, informed, confident decisions consistently across the organization what they will reach is a tipping point, to borrow a term from Gladwell, where now they can apply real-time analytics at every point of impact.

Going back to that CIO study that I mentioned at the beginning, 83 percent of respondents identified business analytics as a top priority so that's something we're going to see a lot of in the next year.

developerWorks: Irshad Raihan, worldwide market manager for Data Management at IBM. Irshad, always a pleasure. Thanks for doing this.

Raihan: Thanks Scott.

developerWorks: Also new on developerWorks this week:

• Access social-networking Web sites through OAuth
• Rich Internet applications using ZK
• Use DB2 optimization guidelines with your pureXML applications: Influencing the access plan
• Using the Digg REST API to programmatically access Digg's best features
• Migrating to AIX 6.1 with nimadm
• Implement a Web 2.0 RESTful facade enabled with JSON using WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances
• Android and iPhone browser wars and enhancing the application with Ajax

... and finally ...

• Anatomy of the libvirt virtualization library

Find it all at ibm.com/developerworks, IBM's premier technical resource for software developers with tools, code, and education on IBM products and open standards technology. I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.

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About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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