One day left in 2004, and I'm very excitingly looking forward to 2005. I've talked to many people lately about that, and not everybody is sharing my enthusiasm. Here are the reasons (in no specific order) why I'm very sure that 2005 will be a great year for the IT:
- Year 2000 is history: In my eyes we had a lot of issues with the year 2000: first of all, companies tended to invest every 3-4 years in new computers (they are written of by the tax and applications needed more performance anyways) and they also invested in new infrastructures when exchanging a lot of computers. The Y2k broke that cycle, they had to invest in new computers and infrastructure to meet the Y2k requirements and they didn't need to invest a lot of money in those areas for the next couple years. Additional some "institutes" announced in 99 that in 2000 the IT-Companies will make up to 10% more money than in 99 and some fools bought this xxx. So there were investments made in 99 to prepare for the flood of work in 2000 - which wasn't coming and those companies had major issues.
- I have seen in the last 12 month that companies are lurking out again to ask how to make their infrastructures more modern and how to perform better. They are interested in improvements again - last time I've seen this was in 99 (and early 2000 before they realized the market going down).
- There are still companies migrating to Windows Server 2003 and realizing what great OS platform it provides. We'll have to migrate those in 2005 too.
- There are more and more companies who have the potential in their infrastructure to use everything a .NET-Platform provides. Web Services are great - and the companies have the potential to use them (they are using current OSs with the .NET Framework) but many haven't done that yet.
- Security: IT-Security is in it's baby-shoes. More and more people start to be concerned and understand what IT-Security is about. There are a lot of interesting solutions out there, and I'm sure there will be a lot of security-projects in 2005.
- Windows Server 2003 SP1 and R2 are both due next year and provide additional features.
- Directory Services, administrative roles, administrative processes: Many unused opportunities for a lot of companies I've seen - let's use those potentials in 2005 too.
I don't think I'm too unrealistic, I agree that not every point will be true with every company, but I'm very sure that we'll still have a lot of work and many interesting projects. Feedback is welcome.
So Happy New Year to everyone!