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Insider News: Top 10 Application Development Trends for 2007
by Rich Barndt

We find our e-mail inbox inundated with IT predictions for the new year from analysts, vendors and consultants. From those predictions and our own predictions, QAT presents our forecast for the top IT trends in application development for the year ahead in no particular order of importance.

1. Shift from Monolithic Applications to Granular Applications -- This shift is orchestrated by automated business processes and will begin with enterprise applications and expand as part of the shift to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
2. Shift of IT Spending from Maintenance to Development -- Application rationalization and modernization, through refractoring business rules, extracting business processes and applying them to advanced capabilities, will cause this shift. Governance will become more aware of the risk associated with old, unsupportable code and demand action.
3. Security and Privacy -- More sophisticated and subtle attacks on security will continue, and prevention and remediation techniques will mimic the defense mechanisms of the human body. People and their lack of adherence to procedures will remain the dominant security and privacy risk.
4. Expanding Edge -- The Edge (the farthest point of IT with application) will continue to extend modestly in terms of devices, but will expand rapidly in volume.
5. SOA and Standards Will Close the Gap between Legacy and Open Systems --
   SOA is all about bringing technology and business closer at a macro level and bringing individual IT components together at a micro level. In much the same way, standards encourage integration between disparate systems. With both, SOA and standards, enabling the type of flexible, composite applications and services required to compete in what is now a global playing field.
6. Business will demand more visible value from IT.
7. Dissatisfaction with vendors will be on the rise.
8. Offshoring will continue, and South America will rise further as an offshore location.
9. Hardware virtualization will become the "norm" for new deployments.
10. Web technologies will be used more - in particular AJAX, will begin to denominate.

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