judith meskill's knowledge notes...

A combination of technology advances, architectural changes, market forces, and best practices will make for a good recovery for IT in the near future, culminating in very strong growth in the longer term, according to Al Lill, group vice president for market researcher Gartner.

"Overall IT spending has bottomed out, and 2004 and 2005 will see a minimum of strong single-digit growth over 2003 levels," Lill says.

Although overall IT spending will increase, the growth rates of specific technology sectors are expected to vary widely.

The crest of the new wave of growth is expected to impact four key areas: secure wireless broadband, very low-power-consumption mobile devices [and screens], easy access to real-time infrastructure, and the widespread pervasion of service-oriented architectures.

Gartner says more companies are planning to replace aging equipment, to install new technologies to improve efficiency, and to boost spending on devices that use open-source software and wireless communications. "Companies are beginning to make the turn from protecting profitability to driving growth," Michael Fleisher, chairman and CEO of Gartner, said at an industry symposium late last month. "Cost cutting will remain important, but it will no longer be your CEO's number one priority."

Gartner also predicts that the recovery will come with a variety of shifts. The firm claims that there will be "a tremendous skills shift within the IT workforce, impacting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers."

Workers with skills in the areas of broadband, wireless, Linux, content management, real-time analytics, data-mining, security, middleware, certification skills, business intelligence, and knowledge management are expected to be the most highly valued.

Gartner analysts also expect massive vendor consolidation through 2005. At that time more than half of the current technology suppliers will be eliminated from the competitive landscape. As a result the remaining vendors will regain pricing power in several technology sectors.

Vivisimo has been selected by leading web search, pharmaceutical, technology, and scholarly-publishing organizations to significantly improve end-user ability to find information. Some of Vivisimo's notable customers during the last year include Cisco Systems, NASA, InfoSpace, Stanford's HighWire Press, Journal of American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, ARC Advisory Group, and Institute of Physics Publishing. License fees from these customers and a dramatic increase in revenue from the Vivisimo website, which optimizes paid listings with clustered web search results, led to the profitable operations achieved over the past twelve months.

"Our vision is that users everywhere will see organized search results by clustering them rather than by merely listing them out. This vision has been partly realized, since millions of people are already benefiting at our customers' websites and our own. And we are doing this profitably in a down economy," said Raul Valdes-Perez, president and co-founder of Vivisimo.

Building on this momentum, Vivisimo's advisory board has recently been strengthened by the addition of Thomas Detre M.D., Distinguished Service Professor of the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and formerly President of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Detre, who was instrumental in the growth and development of the university as one of the nation's foremost leaders in academic medicine and research, will aid Vivisimo in capitalizing on its success in scientific and biomedical markets and the development of pharmaceutical information retrieval solutions.

Vivisimo's innovative technology has been recognized by several leading industry organizations. In the past year, Vivisimo was selected again as the "Best MetaSearch Engine" by industry experts at Search Engine Watch and was named to the "Top 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management" by KM World Magazine.

The business unity process has been a tough one but is probably just as important as the multiparty talks at Kempton Park a decade ago.

Political democracy without economic wellbeing and meaningful participation by the majority of our people is an accident waiting to happen in our society. The recent boycott of voter registration stations is a telling reminder of how meaningless the vote becomes when poverty engulfs a community. The institutional and service platforms of organised business are fundamental to the transformation of our economy.

If we assume the success of transformation hinges on the fundamental change of local and regional chambers or different chapters of sectoral bodies, then one requires equal access to services for business people of all races and persuasions, despite their prior membership affiliations and the fees they can afford.

Enterprise development is vital to boosting economic growth, to broaden access to the wealth creation process. The rubber hits the road at local chamber level, where crucial services such as trade and investment facilitation are provided.