It is that time of the year again. A tough year comes to a close and we all look forward to the coming year with varying degrees of anticipation. What will the new year bring? Before I comment on various predictions, I wanted first to say that I hope 2010 brings you happiness and prosperity. I hope you get what you want and I send good wishes to all – whether friend or competitor! In terms of business and technology, I believe that 2010 is going to be another challenging year. However, there are several trends that I believe will assert themselves strongly in the enterprise. So, here goes with my 2010 predictions:

1. The Data Driven Enterprise becomes a reality in 2010. Significant change will start occurring as enterprises recognize the value of data and the negative impact on business success coming from decades of Application-centric lock-in. CIO’s will turn to architects to remove the IT hairball that threatens their tenure. This IT hairball (a mismash of various application integration technologies) will bring down at least one large enterprise due to operational failure propagating across application integrations.
2. The business-user will finally recognize that it is them, not IT, that must own data. Data Quality is a mess across most enterprises. The primary reason for this has been the historical focus on building isolated applications to automate departmental business processes.  Through these siloed applications, business users are often presented with conflicting data from numerous systems built and badly maintained over the last 15 to 20 years.  2010 will be the year in which business users are finally empowered to define and manage data in a way that gives them confidence that it matters.
3. Cloud Data Integration will eclipse both security and availability to be the defining capability that drives Cloud Computing success. Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be big for cloud computing. I agree. However, my belief is that the cloud represents a unique collaborative dilemma for the business and IT. Business users want the ease of use and perceived freedom, while IT is and HAS TO BE concerned with availability, security and data ownership. Security and availability are being resolved to the extent that we now hear of on- premise downtime more frequently than cloud downtime, while security concerns are becoming less worrysome for broad ranges of computing needs. However, the final hurdle is in remaining in control of your most important asset – your data. 2010 will be the year when data integration delivers for the cloud and provides the ease of use that business users require together with the trust and control that IT demands.  Indeed the business and IT will both be on cloud 9.
4. SOA will emerge from the trough of despair, cross the chasm and deliver in 2010. SOA has had a hard time of it in the last few years. Many pundits have revelled in telling the world that it is dead. I disagree. I believe that the missing element has been the data layer. With the data layer provided through “Data Services” enterprises can finally move forward, disentangle the IT hairball that is strangling innovation and deliver the true value of SOA.
5. Increasing M&A activity will drive an “integration wave” in 2010. More companies will fail, cash-rich companies will acquire and cash-strapped companies will divest.  However, companies are now so large that they look more like a federated market rather than a managed hierarchy.  One of the results of extensive M&A activity is that the typical Fortune 1000 struggles with a big headache – chaotic data from incompatible applications and complex business processes that cut across multiple business functions, customer channels, languages, and legal jurisdictions.  This data chaos will drive an “integration wave” in 2010 as enterprises look to clean up the chaos.  Time-to-value will come down as enterprises use new data virtualization techniques to leverage the data assets more effectively than previously possible.
6. The traditional static datawarehouse will become a thing of the past. Business intelligence now requires far greater capability than the traditional approach provides. 2010 will see the emergence of new capabilities that enable operational intelligence and dynamic real-time analysis. Data Integration will be seen as the key driver for this by enabling the augmentation of datawarehouses with virtualized operational data, and the automation of core business rules to deliver true real-time business intelligence across the enterprise.
7. Mobile devices will become the defacto access point for business data. According to Gartner, over 1.2 billion people will carry mobile devices capable of rich mobile commerce. That’s a whole lot of people and a whole lot of data!  Business users will demand mobile access that will drive a new wave of application development underpinned by the delivery of timely, relevant and trustworthy data.
8. Integration requirements will trump functional requirements in application selections. In past years, the predominant driver of application evaluation and selection processes has focused on application functionality.  Integration needs, or the ability of the application to seamlessly plug into an existing portfolio of systems, has taken a distant second-place position.  The trend in recent years is the growing recognition that individual applications are part of an enterprise system-of-systems and that interoperability is not just equal, but more important, than pure business functionality.  2010 will be the turning point with most (>50%) executives buying in to the idea that “optimizing the whole” rather than just one part of the business drives greater economic value to the firm. Therefore, integratability will become the dominant driver for software product investment decisions.
9. The Integration Factory will become a reality in 2010. Lean integration practices combined with re-usable integration components will become the standard delivery model as enterprises embrace service-oriented principles.
10. England will beat America in the World Cup. They will go on to beat Germany in a thrilling final – winning on penalties to overcome the years of heartache from losing in such a manner in previous World Cups! (if you hadn’t guessed, I’m British!).