The last decade in the enterprise IT

This month marks not only the end of a challenging year but also the end of a decade that started with the dot.com boom followed by bust and is ending in a global economic recession with some signs of recovery.

Looking in the past, I would like to review some of the most significant trends and technologies in the IT, that in my view, marked the last decade and will likely impact developments on the years to come.

Here is my top 10 list:

1. J2EE was announced in 1999 and by the middle of the decade was pervasive in the enterprise as the most used object oriented language environment supported by all major vendors and integrators - IBM, Oracle, BEA, HP, to name just a few - with a single notable exception ...


2. .NET was Microsoft's answer to J2EE, started with lots of buzz and hype around 2000 but evolved to a complex framework running on Windows OS: 2000, NT, XP, Vista, 7 etc.
3. Web services and all their confusing syntax and protocols


4. SOA - service oriented architecture style came with a big promise to finally bring business and IT together. Some claim it is already dead (http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html), but others have more realistic view: http://www.infoq.com/articles/soa-governance-revitalized
5. EDA - event driven architecture, aka SOA 2.0 is a great concept not well understood and under-utilized


6. Agile development with all the variations - XP, Scrum, etc. - a grass root protest and rebellion against project management by the book (any PMP around?) and endless documentation


7. Model Driven Architecture (MDA) made finally possible for modelling tools to deliver to the promise
8. Web 2.0 - blogs, social networks, Facebook, Twitter, etc, we are just at the beginning of a revolution in the enterprise, how business will use internet and mobile devices in the future to connect with customers and define their market niche
9. Cloud Computing will mark the end of the enterprise IT data centers
10. Global IT outsourcing - I left it at the end however it is such a defining trend in the IT departments of small and large business today that it can make easy top of the list. Most of the technologies listed here concurred to the success of outsourcing on global scale