Technology Forecast: 2001-2003

PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Centre for more than ten years. It provides an overview of major areas of information technology (IT) and forecasts significant developments in those areas over the next one to three years.

This Technology Forecast emphasizes the emergence of the mobile Internet—the use of handheld devices and wireless communications to access a variety of network-based services—whose impact during the next five years is expected to be as great as the Web’s during the past five years. This Forecast analyzes the characteristics of "killer" applications for the mobile Internet and discusses the mobile applications already in use or likely to become available in the near future. The book covers the devices used to access the mobile Internet—both handheld computers with wireless network connectivity and Web-enabled mobile phone handsets—as well as other emerging computing platforms, such as consumer Internet access devices and digital set-top boxes for Internet-enhanced access to cable and satellite television.

The Forecast provides extensive coverage of deployments in wireless communications networks, particularly second-and-a-half-generation networks, which provide always-on, packet-switched data communications capabilities, and third-generation networks, which will eventually provide high-bandwidth services to mobile subscribers. Our Forecast also discusses the wide variety of software needed to enable the mobile Internet, including Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browsers and gateways, as well as alternatives to WAP; markup languages for the mobile Internet; wireless application servers; and software tools for creating location-based services.

This Forecast also covers major developments in semiconductors and traditional computing platforms, including the release of new microprocessors based on Intel’s IA-64 architecture and of new versions of Windows and Linux, all of which will allow low-end servers to increase their inroads into the enterprise computing market. The book goes on to consider the continued enhancement of wireline communications over both fiber optic and copper cabling, as well as the ongoing shift of carrier networks from circuit- switching to the Internet Protocol. Among the software trends discussed are the use of distributed component architectures, such as CORBA, Microsoft’s COM+, and Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition, to build networked applications; the increased emphasis on enterprise application integration middleware as a means of linking packaged applications from multiple vendors; and the rise of enterprise information portals that provide a single point of access to an organization’s knowledge resources.

The book also includes five interviews with senior executives of key vendors and network operators associated with the mobile Internet:

*Alan Harper, group strategy director for Vodafone Ltd.
*Kurt Hellström, president and CEO of Ericsson
*Don Listwin, CEO of Openwave Systems
*Dr. Keiji Tachikawa, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo
*Paul Wahl, president and COO of Siebel Systems