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Key Findings






• ICT innovations will come increasingly from around the globe, and the
  concept of "country of origin" will become irrelevant by 2015.
  
• Emerging megavendors will challenge the dominant vendors in many sectors of
  ICT.
  
• Aging populations in the developed world, coupled with the large "young"
  populations in these areas, will strongly influence resource supply and dynamics
  globally.
  
• There is an increasing need to focus on the location and scale of ICT
  investments in emerging markets.


Recommendations






• Assess the business impact of globalization on your enterprise. This can
  provide leading-edge indicators of the impact of globalization on your firm's IT
  initiatives and strategies.
  
• Focus on developing organizational skills and capabilities to increasingly
  leverage a global IT resource pool and to bring innovation into the enterprise.
  
• Avoid tactical and cost-saving-focused approaches to dealing with emerging
  market capabilities, because these will not be sustainable. Instead, define a
  more strategic, holistic and all-encompassing view of the value your enterprise
  can derive from emerging-market engagements.

For example, Charlotte-based Wachovia
($666 billion in assets), which turned to IBM for help designing an SOA for its
payments business, dramatically decreased the amount of time required for
testing new products, according to An. Prior to the re-architecture, the bank
faced obstacles in its testing because of rigid interfaces between its payments
channels, he relates. "Now they can test just once," An says.

As a result of its SOA implementation, Wachovia has seen a 50 percent
reduction in terms of time to market, as well as cost reduction when modifying,
upgrading or adding a new payments interface, An says. This kind of speed and
savings is increasingly important in the payments space as the business becomes
more and more commoditized, he notes.

According to McCartin, a common mistake banks often make is labeling SOA as a
technology approach; it's really about governance and rights, he asserts. "It's
a governance story," McCartin says, noting that National City turned to BEA
Systems, which is now part of Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.), for advice on SOA
governance and management. "Lots of people say they are doing [SOA], but it's
really a hobbyist project [for them]," he adds.

For instance, many of the available frameworks offer a standard definition of
a customer, helping banks identify customers across their many disparate
systems, Narter adds. That normalization is the beginning of standardization
across the bank and increases the effectiveness of shared services across the
enterprise.

IBM's first commercial cloud computing data center is going up in Wuxi, in
southern China. It will provide virtualized computing resources to the region's
chipmaking companies.

The shift to cloud services has forced Microsoft to rethink not just the way
its products are architected, but its data center strategy, too. For years,
Microsoft leased its major data centers, but it has now begun to design,
construct, and own them, with U.S. facilities recently completed or under
construction in Illinois, Texas, and Washington, and another under way in
Dublin, Ireland.

The Los Altos, CA-based website RealTravel, created by chief
executive Ken Leeder, AdForce founder Michael Tanne, and Semantic Web researcher
Tom Gruber, offers an early example of what it will look like to mix Web 2.0
features like tagging and blogging with a semantic data-organization system. The
U.K.-based Garlik, headed by former top executives of the British online bank
Egg, uses an RDF-based database as part of a privacy service that keeps
customers apprised of how much of their personal information is appearing
online. "We think Garlik's technology gives them a really interesting technology
advantage, but this is at a very early stage," says 3i's ­Waterhouse, whose
venture firm helped fund Garlik. "Semantic technology is going to be a slow
burn."

"First comes what I call the World Wide Database, making data
accessible through queries, with no AI involved," Spivack says. "Step two is the
intelligent Web, enabling software to process information more intelligently.
That's what we're working on."