Technology Forecast: 2002-2004, Volume 1

Technology Forecast: 2002–2004 is the latest in a series what the PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Centre has published annually for more than a dozen years. This year’s Forecast is being published in two volumes: Volume 1 focuses on enterprise applications and enabling software, while Volume 2, covers computing infrastructure. Each of these books provides an in-depth description of major areas of information technology (IT) and forecasts significant developments in those areas over the next three years.

Despite the end of the dot-com boom, the focus of enterprise IT continues to shift away from internally oriented applications to systems that extend across organizational boundaries. Enterprise application vendors are enhancing functionality by incorporating analytic capabilities into virtually every product, adding portals to allow users to move transparently between applications, and providing the ability to monitor—and respond to—supply chain events in real time. The technical foundations of enterprise applications are also being transformed as software vendors reimplement their products as collections of components running on Java 2 Enterprise Edition or .net application servers. Evolving standards for Web services eventually will allow those components to form the basis for a new generation of e-business applications.

Volume 1: Navigating the Future of Software discusses these and other changes under way in enterprise IT. It is divided into three major sections, each highlighting a different area of enterprise software, that together comprise 17 chapters providing detailed coverage of specific technologies and applications:

Enterprise Applications contains chapters on enterprise resource planning (ERP); customer relationship management (CRM); supply chain management (SCM); e-markets and e-procurement; data warehousing and analytics; and enterprise portals and knowledge management.

Web Commerce Applications comprises chapters on commerce servers; personalization; online marketing, merchandising, and campaign management; Website content management; and Website analysis.

Enabling Technologies includes chapters on component software; enterprise application integration (EAI); Web services; Web browsers, servers, and markup languages (including XML); the mobile Internet; and digital rights management.

In addition, the book features interviews with leading figures in the IT industry: Prof. F. Warren McFarlan of Harvard Business School; Roger McNamee, cofounder and general partner of Integral Capital Partners; Ray Ozzie, cofounder and CEO of Groove Networks; and Dr. Hasso Plattner, cofounder and CEO of SAP AG.