What will 1999 bring? What will be the issues? Who will be absorbed? Who will survive? .

A fools predictions for 1999 in

(if you get it right your a lucky fool and if you get it wrong your just an unlucky fool)

As the businesses gear up for the final push towards the millennium several major changes will be happening in the IS/IT industry.

E-commerce will heat up as retailers change their business processes to leverage the potential. AOL and Netscape (supported by Sun) will start to offer network-based business solutions. It will be the next generation of services - information services. IBM will have to respond and the PTTs will not just look on.


Databases will be a battle ground as the two major protagonists clash. MS has launched its first salvo and Oracle must respond. Currently the database teams standings are:

• Oracle 27.5%
• IBM 27.2%
• Microsoft 14.9%
• Sybase 4.5%
• Informix 4.4%
• Others 21.5%

It will be bloody. The entry costs will come down ($99 [£60] per user for 99-day trial). There will be comparisons, comparisons of comparisons, statistics and statistics of the statistics. As the sales of MS SQL Server 7.0 improve the major loser will be Oracle. Exciting times ahead.

Traditional ERP will come under heavy criticism. The major players are SAP, Baan and Peoplesoft. They all are going through difficult financial times. The ERP push has been expensive and the benefits have not yet become obvious. The reasons for the criticism is simple - ERP solutions are too complex, too rigid and too difficult to implement. All these cost lots of money.

This development will open up the ERP market again with new players entering. They will have learned from their predecessors mistakes and will offer, simpler, flexible and easier solutions. They will probably be web-technology based with central processing / information servers. Thin client requirements will be handled mainly by the Citrix architectures.

The need for mainframe disciplines for distributed systems will be the opening for storage area networking (SANs). Fibre channel technologies will enable all of the servers (database, storage and processing) to be cabled together into a single entity. This entity can than be managed as a singularity and voila a distributed mainframe.

As partnerships, joint ventures and mergers (big is beautiful again) increase information sharing will become increasingly important. The need for information transformation will make XML more attractive. This will generate a need for an intuitive, learning, flexible and powerful search engine. Portals provide some capabilities but the real requirements are how personal can the search engine operate - will it understand the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the individual users.

Finally, friendships will not survive without a common objective. 1999 will see many friendships put under pressure, some will survive and many will not. MS and Intel, Oracle and Sun, SCO and Compaq, IBM and Sun, Compaq and MS are all worthy of watching

We are in for interesting times in 1999 without catching the millennium bug!!