by Emily Sopensky

With 1999 beckoning, the December meeting of the Austin Software Council featured a forecaster, a capitalist, and a researcher, who, as "students" of the future, offered a glimpse of what to expect from technology in 1999.

Panelists were:
— Larry Vanston, president of Technology Futures, a 20-year-old Austin-based company that is a leader in the field of technology forecasting, especially in telecommunications.

— Gene Lowenthal, who has had a long career in identifying emerging markets and technologies. He is affiliated with a Houston-based investment banking firm, Growth Capital Partners, and also serves on the boards of several privately owned technology companies.

— Jerry Tassone, director of research development at Reality Research, the market research arm of CMP Media. He develops new research programs for the company and is currently working on "E-search," a syndicated program designed to track vendors providing electronic commerce products, services, and solutions to the enterprise marketplace.

Telecomm in flux

Vanston speaks emphatically about the future of telecommunications. The industry is in a state of flux, he says, and undergoing a period of rapid growth. But "ubiquitous telecommunications and data communication does not equal ubiquitous communications," Vanston claims. "We still must overcome barriers of language and cultural differences."

When asked if satellite will provide competition to fiber, Vanston was not shy in indicating his preference for fiber.

Technological leaps

Lowenthal listed storage, displays, input, and imaging as four computing areas destined for significant improvements. For example, common storage systems will hold 100 gigabytes of information at less than $3 per gigabyte and will have an access rate of less than one millisecond. There should be 64-gigabit chips by 2011, he says.

Paradigm shift

"Ecommerce," predicts Tassone, "will provide the single biggest paradigm shift that will drive us socially as well as business-wise over the next 18 months. And it's not the ecommerce that we hear so much about -- how many flowers and books will be bought over the Internet. The focus will be more on the business-to-business."

Electronic commerce has progressed through four principal stages of evolution, explains Tassone. "The first stage is just access. Gather data and get off the Internet. The second is provisional; being able to put on a website what we call brochure-ware."

The third stage is the start of ecommerce when interactivity or self-service capabilities are provided and password-protected. Access to banking information is an example. The fourth and final stage is the ability to conduct transactions.

Tassone mentioned that Sonar, a Bay-area research firm, reported that over 57 percent of the U.S. companies surveyed say they are going to implement ecommerce by the year 2000. "This is going to be the biggest boon to software companies in the next 12 months," Tassone concludes.

Lowenthal concurs. He predicts that logistics will be the focus of business-to-business solutions. "There's a buzzword out there -- disintermediation -- which is about the disenfranchising of the middleman. It's the idea of having everything just in time," Lowenthal says.

Ecommerce and the Internet are the great equalizers, say the panelists. Two guys in a garage with a high-powered server can appear to be the same size as a major firm with thousands of employees. But success over the long haul will be attained by those companies that build brand equity, deliver value-added services, respond to customers, and maintain loyalty.

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Published in Texas Software News, January 1999

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