Top 13 Emerging Technologies That Ensure IT Liberty

When it comes to IT, there are many forms of tyranny. Some of it comes hidden in the terms of a contract, while other times it is embedded within a protocol or some other piece of embedded software.

At the time of acquisition, the source of the IT tyranny seems innocuous enough. But before anybody within the IT organization realizes it, the trap has been sprung and the IT organization wakes up one morning to discover that it has been locked into a particular vendor or technology for years to come.

With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, these are especially perilous times when it comes to IT tyranny. In the name of innovation, vendors of all types and sizes are promoting all kinds of technological advances that come laden with all kinds of proprietary extensions designed to bind the customer to that vendor.

The good news is that there are new emerging technologies that preserve IT liberty. As a salute to Independence Day, we’ve assembled 13 of them here as a tip of the hat to the original 13 colonies.

The list includes offerings from all across the technology stack, such as a business rules engine that reduces the dependency on specific coding methodologies and Layer 2 network switches that give IT organizations the flexibility they need to connect to multiple cloud computing providers. Of course, there is also a range of emerging virtualization and network standards that could have a profound effect on IT in the years ahead, in addition to better-known technologies such as HTML 5.

No matter how enterprise IT evolves going forward, history has shown time and again the importance of maintaining control over your destiny. And the key to that success in the context of IT has been to always make sure your options remain as open as possible, especially given the proclivities of the average vendor to take as much control as anyone allows them.

Click through for the top 13 emerging technologies that ensure IT liberty.

Now only does it free IT from the tyranny of Windows, it provides a path to manage the chaos of mobile computing.

Representational State Transfer takes the complexity out of integrating Web applications.

Lightweight ESBs that facilitate integration via standard interfaces are getting embedded everywhere.

Still in their infancy, these servers will greatly simplify data management in the years ahead.

Some form of this will define the emerging cross-platform data center fabric.

Allows for integration of applications and data at a much higher level of abstraction.

Content Management Interoperability Services will be critical for sharing data across the cloud.

A free cloud management platform that is rapidly becoming a de facto standard.

Not only reduces the amount of IT infrastructure required, it removes a lot of integration headaches.

Often overlooked, mastering this layer is critical for maintaining control over cloud providers.

Allows application workloads to move across different virtual machine implementations.

If you want cloud computing interoperability, start with the data.

Makes people care less which mobile computing device is being used.