OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 1-8-09

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
January 8, 2009 meeting

Present: Sharon Solomon, Mitch Morris, Sean Brown, Jennifer Curlee, Jim Sutter, Dave Phillips

The New Year started slowly as several members were unable to make it at the last moment, including our scheduled speaker, Randy Farner, Vitreous Solutions. In place of the normal presentation, we had asked members to come to the meeting with one technology prediction, and to briefly describe how it might affect our future.

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to the presentation material, when available.

Topic: Technology Predictions

I started the discussion by selecting Memristor as my technology prediction. Since the dawn of electronics, we’ve had only three types of circuit components —resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley’s Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.
What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can “remember” how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today’s flash memory. Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips, as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today’s PCs. Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.
When is it coming? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.

This was one of the 15 predictions listed in CIO Insider, Oct 31, and PC World, Oct 29. Others include Quad Core (multiple core CPUs), the Nehalem chip (Graphics Board GPU), USB 3.0, wireless power transmission, Windows 7, Google desktop OS, and cell phone GPS.

Sharon Solomon came armed with several predictions: Gartner’s Top 10 for 2009, as listed in CIO Magazine Michael Bullock blog, including virtualization, cloud computing, web oriented architectures, enterprise mashups, networking systems, BI and Green computing. Neal Weinberg, Network World, had 9 hot technologies for 2009, including 802.11n, which means that wireless LANs are now viable. Unisys rolled out 5 predictions for 2009 including 3 on IT automation, service delivery and infrastructure management. Apple also had 6 including iPod 3.6, iPhone SDK, Macbook Air and their new OS 10.6 Leopard.

Jim Sutter shared with us some of the following Tech Republic’s predictions:
IN: IT pros with business skills - OUT: Technical certifications
IN: Web-based applications - OUT: Build-it-yourself custom software
IN: Automating processes to save money - OUT: Long-term projects
IN: Macs in the enterprise - OUT: Upgrading XP machines to Vista
IN: Virtualization - OUT: Infinite racks of small servers
IN: Core i7 - OUT: The Pentium brand
IN: Thin clients - OUT: A laptop for every knowledge worker
IN: WiMAX - OUT: Metro Wi-Fi
IN: Ubuntu - OUT: Red Hat
IN: Business Intelligence (BI) - OUT: SNMP data overload
IN: Telecommuting - OUT: The 8-5 work day
IN: HP laptops and desktops - OUT: Dell laptops and desktops
IN: Multifunction server appliances - OUT: Best-of-breed network devices
IN: Smartphones - OUT: Desktop-replacement notebooks
IN: Video conferencing - OUT: Air travel for a single meeting
IN: More internships - OUT: Filling open positions
IN: Conserving energy - OUT: Building IT for future growth
IN: WAN acceleration - OUT: Dark fiber
IN: 3G broadband - OUT: Frame relay
IN: Netbooks - OUT: Desktop PCs
IN: Microsoft Office on the Web - OUT: Azure, Live Mesh, and Windows Live
IN: CIOs with minimal tech background - OUT: CIO as lead engineer
IN: IT/business integration - OUT: Centralized IT departments

Mitch, Jennifer and Sean were active in the discussion without presenting specific technology predictions. This was a fun session.
See you on January 8, 2009 – 7:00 a.m. in the RJTCompuquest conference room at:
940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.