At the beginning of this decade HP put forth a vision for the future data center that they have now fulfilled with both products and services offerings. Viewed by some at the time as a reaction to IBM Applications on Demand, HP coined Adaptive Infrastructure as its vision for a "composable" data center that let resources  be quickly and easily assigned to business services based on their needs and for IT Ops to achieve and maintain high utilization of their data center resources.

One of the documents which I most enjoyed writing, "Emerging Energy Technologies Open Opportunities For The Technology Industry," just appeared on the Forrester web site.

Forrester analysts, Chris Mines in particular, have been publishing no small number of studies about Green IT. What was missing, I thought, was where the technology industry fits into one of the few parts of the economy that's likely to grow over the next couple of years. Public investment will accelerate growth in this market, but there won't be one big Manhattan Project-style program. Therefore, if you're not familiar with this market, it might be hard to figure out where to start.

Many product managers who work with or within Agile teams have told me how they've felt left in the dust during the early phases of the Agile implementation. "We've sighted our target persona!"the development team exclaims. "Champagne for everyone!"

Unfortunately, they forget to invite to these festivities the very person who will, beyond this sighting, provide ongoing intelligence about that role--and the use cases, and whether that's the right role for the product, and what the competition is doing to serve that person, and whether there's a market for all this technology in the first place. A good product manager also has mad skillz in collecting and analyzing this information, something that even the most wunderbar of Wunderkinder doesn't necessarily have right out of the womb.

Shane Hastie at InfoIQ describes the same problem facing business analysts, the cousins of product managers in IT organizations.

By Sharyn Leaver

As we enter a new year, business process & applications professionals who want to stay ahead of the pack need to know what to expect in 2009. Uncertain economic times lie ahead, and those professionals who know what is on the horizon will best weather the storm. Here are some key trends in key process and app areas that our analysts predict for 2009:

Financial Performance Management: Financial management professionals stand in the spotlight as the economic downturn continues and companies cope with weaker demand, price pressures, rising costs, and credit constraints. Technology and process strategies in 2009 will focus on improving planning, budgeting and forecasting, and cash and risk management while under the cloud of a very uncertain and unfavorable tax environment.