Description
Organizations and individuals around the world spend billions of dollars each year providing and using information technology. New capabilities, standards, and products appear every day.
14 Winter 2010 ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education
Organizations and individuals around the
world spend billions of dollars each year
providing and using information technology.
New capabilities, standards, and products
appear every day. Many involve incompat-
ible or even competing speci?cations and
interfaces. Remember VHS versus Betamax?
How about Blu-ray versus HD DVD? Which
technology is the right choice for you or
your organization? Working with ACUTA,
researchers at Murray State University (MSU)
collected and analyzed scienti?c, academic,
industry, and popular data in order to predict
technology trends. The target timeframe for
the predictions was two to ?ve years.
If this were an easy task, readily approach-
able with a standard scienti?c method, mak-
ing IT investments would be much simpler.
There have been many famous technology
forecast blunders, such as Tom Watson, chair-
man of IBM, stating in 1943, “I think there is
a market for maybe ?ve computers,” and Bill
Gates, Microsoft, in 1981 saying, “640K ought
to be enough for everyone.” The predictions
that follow are personal opinion about the
most important technology trends for the
next two to ?ve years (your results may vary).
Methodology
Before describing what was done, it is impor-
tant to stress what the methodology was not.
This project was not a formal, highly funded
modeling or simulation-based effort such
as would typically be done by government,
military, or investment/market researchers.
In this case, a variety of relatively informal
approaches was used to collect and assess
information to forecast the most important
emerging technology trends based on a fairly
rigorous review of available information,
including forecasts made by industry sources,
such as Gartner Inc.
1
Michael Bowman, PhD
Murray State University
A basic but essential analytical assump-
tion was that the more often a technology
term appeared in literature, on the Web, or
in a conversation, the more likely it was to be
a viable and important technology trend. As
an example, the concept of cloud computing
appeared in one or two articles in technology
publications more than ?ve years ago. One or
two years later, it might have been in 10 articles
per year. Currently, the phrase cloud comput-
ing probably appears in 100 articles per week.
This kind of progression is a clear indicator of
emerging importance. The trick is to identify
the emerging trends early and know which are
important.
The three student research assistants—Josh
Stump, Stefan Bischoff, and Jeffrey Kaleta—
were challenged with proposing and developing
their own innovative approaches to supporting,
improving, or refuting the author’s predictions.
Each student designed and implemented an
approach that took the lead researcher’s input
and generated some level of con?rmation or
rejection of the predictions.
In addition to my own literature review,
about 75 students in MSU computer science
and networking classes were asked to nominate
and vote on proposals for “the next big thing”
in IT. Their opinions are factored into the pre-
dictions that follow.
Technology Trend Predictions
The ?fteen items listed are the top new tech-
nologies, approaches, standards, or issues
identi?ed by the project. They are listed in their
relative order of importance based on either
their expected impact or how quickly they will
become a current hot topic.
1. Cloud computing and its variations. Cloud
computing is the concept of computing and IT
resources being positioned in the Internet or an
intranet “cloud,” rather than owned and oper-
Emerging Technology Trends—
Finding the Next Big Thing
ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education Winter 2010 15
ated locally. This topic cannot be discussed without an introduc-
tion of the many variations, such as private clouds, public clouds,
hybrid clouds, open cloud, cloud storage, agile infrastructure, and
real-time infrastructure.
2. Virtualization. Running multiple iterations of one or more
operating systems on or from a single powerful computing plat-
form is the modern, popular de?nition of virtualization. Multiple
virtualization systems, software, and approaches exist, and many
organizations are moving quickly to virtualize their computing
environments.
3. Mobile computing. Mobile computing is the use of mobile and
handheld devices as the primary computing platform of choice.
Mobile devices combine communications and computing power
in a single device, and whether we use a cellular network, WiFi, or
Bluetooth, many more of us are staying connected to the world
through mobile computing. Mobile computing is also how adver-
tisers and cyber criminals want to connect with us!
4. Social networks and their application. Social net-
working, and all the related interaction, advertisement,
gaming, and cybercrime, appears to be the killer app of
the Internet age. Everyone, from preteens to 80-year-old
seniors, is staying involved with friends, family, and com-
munities through social networks.
5. Wireless networks. End users expect wireless access to
the Internet from everywhere, and IT providers are work-
ing hard to deliver it. This includes the family of IEEE
802.11 WiFi standards, 802.16 WiMAX, and the emerging
Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard.
6. Collaborative computing and collaboration tools.
Like a trip down memory lane back to the days of Lotus
Notes,
2
many product developers, service providers, and
endusers are again talking about the importance of col-
laborative effort now supported by mobile computing
and communications platforms.
7. Green IT. Green IT is providing and using computing
and communications with a focus on being environmen-
tally friendly. With rising energy and environmental costs,
Green IT is (and always has been) a smart business move.
8. Computer games and online gaming. Game play on
computers, game consoles, and the Internet now rivals
industry pro?ts from movies/motion pictures.
3
Even the
simplest, single-player games on the market today usu-
ally require Internet connectivity for license veri?cation
and sale of extra content before a game can be played.
This is an important topic for both the time and network
bandwidth consumed. It is also an emerging venue for
cybercrime.
9. Context-aware computing. Context-aware computing is a con-
cept that combines many of our top 15 topics. The primary idea
is that our mobile computing devices will know our location,
our interests, our typical activities, and the current time and will
automatically prompt us about opportunities or issues in a timely
and context-aware manner. Imagine walking down the street and
having your cell phone remind you it is lunch time, offering direc-
tions to a local restaurant, and offering a discount coupon for your
favorite meal at the restaurant.
10. E-health records. Mandated by a variety of national and local
laws and regulations, our medical records are being digitized and
made available for collaborative medical efforts via networks.
Along with the opportunity for portability and collaboration come
requirements to ensure security, accuracy, and privacy.
ACUTA_JSI ad 10.2010.indd 1 10/19/10 1:27 PM
4
16 Winter 2010 ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education
11. eDiscovery. The more that of?cial documentation and records
go digital, the more likely it is that these e-records will be required
by courts. eDiscovery is the formal retrieval and presentation of
electronic records, such as text messages and e-mail, for use by the
legal system.
12. Cybercrime. All of our computing and communications top-
ics include an increased exposure to cybercrime. Crooks go where
the money is, and today money and opportunity are online and
mobile.
13. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A topic long researched
by the military, MANET is coming to commercial products. Rather
than rely on dedicated wireless access points and other dedicated
networking devices, end-user mobile devices will interact and
cooperate to extend communications services out to remote users.
14. Software-de?ned radios (SDRs). Another topic long
researched by the military, SDR could revolutionize communica-
tions interfaces and interoperability. Rather than a communica-
tions device having a limited, hardwired capability to communicate
on certain frequencies with certain protocols, SDR would permit a
single device to communicate in a much broader range of formats
and protocols by switching between software components.
15. Solid-state memory and storage. The era of rotating-disc-based
mass storage is rapidly coming to a close. The solid-state technolo-
gy that makes USB thumb drives possible and affordable is becom-
ing less expensive and denser and will soon replace the much less
reliable disc-based storage that we have used for six decades.
Summary of Recommendations
Each of these topics is likely to have some importance for every
ACUTA member. While all the data collection, analysis, and report-
ing done within this project has been done with ACUTA members
in mind, the following paragraphs summarize advice and forecasts
speci?cally for the ACUTA membership.
Wireless access everywhere, with full Internet access to and
from handheld and larger devices, will be expected as the mini-
This ACUTA project served as a wonderful opportunity to
spawn and motivate student-designed and -executed research.
While their projects warrant publication of academic papers
on their efforts, it is also appropriate to mention them here.
Josh Stump is an MSU undergraduate computer science
major. To support this project, he created a series of automated
online search programs that, with a single mouse click, would
execute multiple complex searches of the Internet for the
technology terms that this research produced. Josh’s program
used advanced features of Google’s search engine to indicate
how popular a particular term was with regard to how many
“hits” it produced. Since the Google search engine does not
encourage automated searches, development of these pro-
grams required coordination with Google and some complex
programming approaches.
Stefan Bischoff and Jeffrey Kaleta were MSU graduate
information system students who both recently completed
their degrees. Stefan took the initial technology terms the
research produced and created a database that stored the
terms and their synonyms, as well as the relationships between
terms that were identi?ed over time. Stefan also produced the
complex multiline search terms that were used in our automated
Google searches.
A search for cloud computing provides a powerful example of
the importance of doing a proper search of the Internet. Search-
ing for cloud computing (without quote marks) results in over 20
million hits—most of which are not useful items. Simply adding
quote marks and searching for “cloud computing” still produces
over 10 million hits. A properly formatted search string that
includes synonyms and excludes certain unrelated words reduces
the results to 950 hits, which are almost all useful information.
Jeff Kaleta created a relational database of the technology
terms and sources that were produced by the project and then
developed data-mining routines that examined the informa-
tion to extract relationships between the terms. An example of a
relationship between technology terms that his data mining pro-
duced is the link between context-aware applications and mobile
computing. A publication that had an article on context-aware
computing on a particular date was very likely to have an article
on mobile computing in the same edition, and both terms were
likely to appear in both articles. Jeff ’s research also included the
development of relationship models that allow forecasting on the
rise or decline in popularity of the terms.
Students and Supporting Projects
ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education Winter 2010 17
mum standard by users. If your campus and service providers
do not offer this, you will be at a competitive disadvantage. WiFi
variants will continue to get better and cheaper but probably will
still not provide the long-range coverage you would like in the
next ?ve years. WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) has ?nally become a viable
longer-range wireless option in terms of product availability; but if
you go this route now, you may be buying into as dead a standard
as Betamax tapes. The emerging LTE wireless standard may kill
WiMAX before it is widely adopted.
Your wireless coverage will soon need to support more complex
and bandwidth-intensive applications. Wireless access to social
networking, context-aware applications, mobile gaming, and elec-
tronic wallet capabilities will be expected on every campus within
?ve years.
While expanding your wireless networks, also expect to adopt
IPv6 to some extent during the next ?ve years. Most of the IT
equipment you buy today is IPv6 ready, and some of your campus
IT systems may already be using it, whether or not you are aware
of it. You will not be able to acquire signi?cant blocks of IPv4
addresses after 2010.
It won’t be common soon, but perhaps by the end of the next
?ve years, your users’ mobile devices may be able to help you
with your wireless coverage problems. Mobile ad hoc network-
ing (MANET) has been researched and tested for many years, but
device manufacturers may soon routinely include this capability
in their mobile devices. If you allow it, users’ devices that are out
of direct range of your wireless access points could be assisted by
other users who are within range, facilitating the relay of the dis-
tant users’ data to and from your wireless access points.
Enhanced computing and network environments will be
expected from your users, while your budgets will remain ?at—or
even go down. Some of the latest technology trends can support
doing more with less. Cloud computing, virtualization, green IT,
and solid-state memory and storage are all technology trends that
have the potential to save you money while enhancing capabilities.
Cybercrime may be one of the most important issues of the
21st century. Although users will demand unlimited wireless access
and complex mobile computing and communications capabilities,
they will also expect safety, security, and privacy. The criminals of
the world know that there is money to be made on the Internet
and through your wireless networks.
If you fail to provide safety, security, and privacy in your IT
environment, your networks and computers can become crime
scenes subject to eDiscovery that can cost you millions of dollars
and damage your reputation. Your IT environment and security/
privacy requirements will become more complex because of steady
progress on e-health records. The government is requiring, and
users are beginning to expect, their medical records to be digital,
mobile, and available everywhere, while never having their security
and privacy violated.
Michael Bowman, PhD, is an associate professor at Murray State University.
Reach him at [email protected].
References
1. Gartner Inc. (ed.): Press Releases. Gartner Identifes the Top 10 Strategic
Technologies for 2010. www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613 10/20/2009,
accessed on 11/01/2010.
2. IBM (ed.): The History of Notes and Domino. www.ibm.com/developerworks/lo-
tus/library/ls-NDHistory/ 12/20/2005, accessed on 11/01/2011
3. Crandall, Robert W., and Sidak, J. Gregory, Video Games: Serious Business for
America’s Economy. Entertainment Software Association Report, 2006.http://ssrn.
com/abstract=969728, accessed on 11/01/2011.
Where’s Your Focus for the
Future, Apogee?
We’ve seen many technologies rise and fall on campus
over the past decade. Traditional phones, for example, are
now dead, and nonmobile VoIP is simply a non-starter
for college students today. Over the long run, we also see
traditional cable TV going the way of the landlines. From
our perspective, the future of residential technology will be
centered around bandwidth and mobility.
Considering the rising call for pervasive wireless cover-
age and increasing bandwidth consumption, all of our
partners are now being transitioned to the most robust
802.11n wireless standard to meet the scale of present and
future student demand. One of the unique things we are
doing in this area is enabling multicast video to run over
the wireless network. We are also working on bridging
student cellular use with the campus network. We’ve ex-
perimented with everything from small femtocells to full-
scale carrier towers. Our primary focus is on innovation
that will tie student use of mobile and cellular technology
to the campus network in ways that are both meaningful
to the university from a cost-value perspective and attrac-
tive to students who want to take advantage of the latest
technology without sacri?cing mobility.
u
doc_190329517.pdf
Organizations and individuals around the world spend billions of dollars each year providing and using information technology. New capabilities, standards, and products appear every day.
14 Winter 2010 ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education
Organizations and individuals around the
world spend billions of dollars each year
providing and using information technology.
New capabilities, standards, and products
appear every day. Many involve incompat-
ible or even competing speci?cations and
interfaces. Remember VHS versus Betamax?
How about Blu-ray versus HD DVD? Which
technology is the right choice for you or
your organization? Working with ACUTA,
researchers at Murray State University (MSU)
collected and analyzed scienti?c, academic,
industry, and popular data in order to predict
technology trends. The target timeframe for
the predictions was two to ?ve years.
If this were an easy task, readily approach-
able with a standard scienti?c method, mak-
ing IT investments would be much simpler.
There have been many famous technology
forecast blunders, such as Tom Watson, chair-
man of IBM, stating in 1943, “I think there is
a market for maybe ?ve computers,” and Bill
Gates, Microsoft, in 1981 saying, “640K ought
to be enough for everyone.” The predictions
that follow are personal opinion about the
most important technology trends for the
next two to ?ve years (your results may vary).
Methodology
Before describing what was done, it is impor-
tant to stress what the methodology was not.
This project was not a formal, highly funded
modeling or simulation-based effort such
as would typically be done by government,
military, or investment/market researchers.
In this case, a variety of relatively informal
approaches was used to collect and assess
information to forecast the most important
emerging technology trends based on a fairly
rigorous review of available information,
including forecasts made by industry sources,
such as Gartner Inc.
1
Michael Bowman, PhD
Murray State University
A basic but essential analytical assump-
tion was that the more often a technology
term appeared in literature, on the Web, or
in a conversation, the more likely it was to be
a viable and important technology trend. As
an example, the concept of cloud computing
appeared in one or two articles in technology
publications more than ?ve years ago. One or
two years later, it might have been in 10 articles
per year. Currently, the phrase cloud comput-
ing probably appears in 100 articles per week.
This kind of progression is a clear indicator of
emerging importance. The trick is to identify
the emerging trends early and know which are
important.
The three student research assistants—Josh
Stump, Stefan Bischoff, and Jeffrey Kaleta—
were challenged with proposing and developing
their own innovative approaches to supporting,
improving, or refuting the author’s predictions.
Each student designed and implemented an
approach that took the lead researcher’s input
and generated some level of con?rmation or
rejection of the predictions.
In addition to my own literature review,
about 75 students in MSU computer science
and networking classes were asked to nominate
and vote on proposals for “the next big thing”
in IT. Their opinions are factored into the pre-
dictions that follow.
Technology Trend Predictions
The ?fteen items listed are the top new tech-
nologies, approaches, standards, or issues
identi?ed by the project. They are listed in their
relative order of importance based on either
their expected impact or how quickly they will
become a current hot topic.
1. Cloud computing and its variations. Cloud
computing is the concept of computing and IT
resources being positioned in the Internet or an
intranet “cloud,” rather than owned and oper-
Emerging Technology Trends—
Finding the Next Big Thing
ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education Winter 2010 15
ated locally. This topic cannot be discussed without an introduc-
tion of the many variations, such as private clouds, public clouds,
hybrid clouds, open cloud, cloud storage, agile infrastructure, and
real-time infrastructure.
2. Virtualization. Running multiple iterations of one or more
operating systems on or from a single powerful computing plat-
form is the modern, popular de?nition of virtualization. Multiple
virtualization systems, software, and approaches exist, and many
organizations are moving quickly to virtualize their computing
environments.
3. Mobile computing. Mobile computing is the use of mobile and
handheld devices as the primary computing platform of choice.
Mobile devices combine communications and computing power
in a single device, and whether we use a cellular network, WiFi, or
Bluetooth, many more of us are staying connected to the world
through mobile computing. Mobile computing is also how adver-
tisers and cyber criminals want to connect with us!
4. Social networks and their application. Social net-
working, and all the related interaction, advertisement,
gaming, and cybercrime, appears to be the killer app of
the Internet age. Everyone, from preteens to 80-year-old
seniors, is staying involved with friends, family, and com-
munities through social networks.
5. Wireless networks. End users expect wireless access to
the Internet from everywhere, and IT providers are work-
ing hard to deliver it. This includes the family of IEEE
802.11 WiFi standards, 802.16 WiMAX, and the emerging
Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard.
6. Collaborative computing and collaboration tools.
Like a trip down memory lane back to the days of Lotus
Notes,
2
many product developers, service providers, and
endusers are again talking about the importance of col-
laborative effort now supported by mobile computing
and communications platforms.
7. Green IT. Green IT is providing and using computing
and communications with a focus on being environmen-
tally friendly. With rising energy and environmental costs,
Green IT is (and always has been) a smart business move.
8. Computer games and online gaming. Game play on
computers, game consoles, and the Internet now rivals
industry pro?ts from movies/motion pictures.
3
Even the
simplest, single-player games on the market today usu-
ally require Internet connectivity for license veri?cation
and sale of extra content before a game can be played.
This is an important topic for both the time and network
bandwidth consumed. It is also an emerging venue for
cybercrime.
9. Context-aware computing. Context-aware computing is a con-
cept that combines many of our top 15 topics. The primary idea
is that our mobile computing devices will know our location,
our interests, our typical activities, and the current time and will
automatically prompt us about opportunities or issues in a timely
and context-aware manner. Imagine walking down the street and
having your cell phone remind you it is lunch time, offering direc-
tions to a local restaurant, and offering a discount coupon for your
favorite meal at the restaurant.
10. E-health records. Mandated by a variety of national and local
laws and regulations, our medical records are being digitized and
made available for collaborative medical efforts via networks.
Along with the opportunity for portability and collaboration come
requirements to ensure security, accuracy, and privacy.
ACUTA_JSI ad 10.2010.indd 1 10/19/10 1:27 PM
4
16 Winter 2010 ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education
11. eDiscovery. The more that of?cial documentation and records
go digital, the more likely it is that these e-records will be required
by courts. eDiscovery is the formal retrieval and presentation of
electronic records, such as text messages and e-mail, for use by the
legal system.
12. Cybercrime. All of our computing and communications top-
ics include an increased exposure to cybercrime. Crooks go where
the money is, and today money and opportunity are online and
mobile.
13. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A topic long researched
by the military, MANET is coming to commercial products. Rather
than rely on dedicated wireless access points and other dedicated
networking devices, end-user mobile devices will interact and
cooperate to extend communications services out to remote users.
14. Software-de?ned radios (SDRs). Another topic long
researched by the military, SDR could revolutionize communica-
tions interfaces and interoperability. Rather than a communica-
tions device having a limited, hardwired capability to communicate
on certain frequencies with certain protocols, SDR would permit a
single device to communicate in a much broader range of formats
and protocols by switching between software components.
15. Solid-state memory and storage. The era of rotating-disc-based
mass storage is rapidly coming to a close. The solid-state technolo-
gy that makes USB thumb drives possible and affordable is becom-
ing less expensive and denser and will soon replace the much less
reliable disc-based storage that we have used for six decades.
Summary of Recommendations
Each of these topics is likely to have some importance for every
ACUTA member. While all the data collection, analysis, and report-
ing done within this project has been done with ACUTA members
in mind, the following paragraphs summarize advice and forecasts
speci?cally for the ACUTA membership.
Wireless access everywhere, with full Internet access to and
from handheld and larger devices, will be expected as the mini-
This ACUTA project served as a wonderful opportunity to
spawn and motivate student-designed and -executed research.
While their projects warrant publication of academic papers
on their efforts, it is also appropriate to mention them here.
Josh Stump is an MSU undergraduate computer science
major. To support this project, he created a series of automated
online search programs that, with a single mouse click, would
execute multiple complex searches of the Internet for the
technology terms that this research produced. Josh’s program
used advanced features of Google’s search engine to indicate
how popular a particular term was with regard to how many
“hits” it produced. Since the Google search engine does not
encourage automated searches, development of these pro-
grams required coordination with Google and some complex
programming approaches.
Stefan Bischoff and Jeffrey Kaleta were MSU graduate
information system students who both recently completed
their degrees. Stefan took the initial technology terms the
research produced and created a database that stored the
terms and their synonyms, as well as the relationships between
terms that were identi?ed over time. Stefan also produced the
complex multiline search terms that were used in our automated
Google searches.
A search for cloud computing provides a powerful example of
the importance of doing a proper search of the Internet. Search-
ing for cloud computing (without quote marks) results in over 20
million hits—most of which are not useful items. Simply adding
quote marks and searching for “cloud computing” still produces
over 10 million hits. A properly formatted search string that
includes synonyms and excludes certain unrelated words reduces
the results to 950 hits, which are almost all useful information.
Jeff Kaleta created a relational database of the technology
terms and sources that were produced by the project and then
developed data-mining routines that examined the informa-
tion to extract relationships between the terms. An example of a
relationship between technology terms that his data mining pro-
duced is the link between context-aware applications and mobile
computing. A publication that had an article on context-aware
computing on a particular date was very likely to have an article
on mobile computing in the same edition, and both terms were
likely to appear in both articles. Jeff ’s research also included the
development of relationship models that allow forecasting on the
rise or decline in popularity of the terms.
Students and Supporting Projects
ACUTA Journal of Information Communications Technology in Higher Education Winter 2010 17
mum standard by users. If your campus and service providers
do not offer this, you will be at a competitive disadvantage. WiFi
variants will continue to get better and cheaper but probably will
still not provide the long-range coverage you would like in the
next ?ve years. WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) has ?nally become a viable
longer-range wireless option in terms of product availability; but if
you go this route now, you may be buying into as dead a standard
as Betamax tapes. The emerging LTE wireless standard may kill
WiMAX before it is widely adopted.
Your wireless coverage will soon need to support more complex
and bandwidth-intensive applications. Wireless access to social
networking, context-aware applications, mobile gaming, and elec-
tronic wallet capabilities will be expected on every campus within
?ve years.
While expanding your wireless networks, also expect to adopt
IPv6 to some extent during the next ?ve years. Most of the IT
equipment you buy today is IPv6 ready, and some of your campus
IT systems may already be using it, whether or not you are aware
of it. You will not be able to acquire signi?cant blocks of IPv4
addresses after 2010.
It won’t be common soon, but perhaps by the end of the next
?ve years, your users’ mobile devices may be able to help you
with your wireless coverage problems. Mobile ad hoc network-
ing (MANET) has been researched and tested for many years, but
device manufacturers may soon routinely include this capability
in their mobile devices. If you allow it, users’ devices that are out
of direct range of your wireless access points could be assisted by
other users who are within range, facilitating the relay of the dis-
tant users’ data to and from your wireless access points.
Enhanced computing and network environments will be
expected from your users, while your budgets will remain ?at—or
even go down. Some of the latest technology trends can support
doing more with less. Cloud computing, virtualization, green IT,
and solid-state memory and storage are all technology trends that
have the potential to save you money while enhancing capabilities.
Cybercrime may be one of the most important issues of the
21st century. Although users will demand unlimited wireless access
and complex mobile computing and communications capabilities,
they will also expect safety, security, and privacy. The criminals of
the world know that there is money to be made on the Internet
and through your wireless networks.
If you fail to provide safety, security, and privacy in your IT
environment, your networks and computers can become crime
scenes subject to eDiscovery that can cost you millions of dollars
and damage your reputation. Your IT environment and security/
privacy requirements will become more complex because of steady
progress on e-health records. The government is requiring, and
users are beginning to expect, their medical records to be digital,
mobile, and available everywhere, while never having their security
and privacy violated.
Michael Bowman, PhD, is an associate professor at Murray State University.
Reach him at [email protected].
References
1. Gartner Inc. (ed.): Press Releases. Gartner Identifes the Top 10 Strategic
Technologies for 2010. www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613 10/20/2009,
accessed on 11/01/2010.
2. IBM (ed.): The History of Notes and Domino. www.ibm.com/developerworks/lo-
tus/library/ls-NDHistory/ 12/20/2005, accessed on 11/01/2011
3. Crandall, Robert W., and Sidak, J. Gregory, Video Games: Serious Business for
America’s Economy. Entertainment Software Association Report, 2006.http://ssrn.
com/abstract=969728, accessed on 11/01/2011.
Where’s Your Focus for the
Future, Apogee?
We’ve seen many technologies rise and fall on campus
over the past decade. Traditional phones, for example, are
now dead, and nonmobile VoIP is simply a non-starter
for college students today. Over the long run, we also see
traditional cable TV going the way of the landlines. From
our perspective, the future of residential technology will be
centered around bandwidth and mobility.
Considering the rising call for pervasive wireless cover-
age and increasing bandwidth consumption, all of our
partners are now being transitioned to the most robust
802.11n wireless standard to meet the scale of present and
future student demand. One of the unique things we are
doing in this area is enabling multicast video to run over
the wireless network. We are also working on bridging
student cellular use with the campus network. We’ve ex-
perimented with everything from small femtocells to full-
scale carrier towers. Our primary focus is on innovation
that will tie student use of mobile and cellular technology
to the campus network in ways that are both meaningful
to the university from a cost-value perspective and attrac-
tive to students who want to take advantage of the latest
technology without sacri?cing mobility.
u
doc_190329517.pdf