The year 2010 is well on its way and many of you posted their insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

Hottest trends: cloud, agile and social media

If you combine those predictions/outlooks with this enormous list compiled by the Cutter Consortium you’ll see a lot of stuff that repeatedly gets mentioned. Cloud, Agile and Social Media seem to be the hottest trends for the years ahead, and Open Source, Operational BI and Analytical Databases are also part of almost every list.

Start your own marathon

I tend to be a bit skeptical about these predictions. They seem to overlook the fact that since the final quarter of 2008 many people have been laid off, costs have been cut to the bare acceptable minimum and a lot of companies are just struggling to survive. Nevertheless, a marathon also consists of many single steps, and some of these steps can be made very easily. Since I don’t have a crystal ball to make predictions, I’ll give some tips for the year to come that can help you start your own marathon.

1. Excel

This might seem strange coming from an open source advocate like me, but I think we’re likely to see an even wider adoption of Excel as a BI tool. And for the daring few that are using OpenOffice Calc, there’s some good news for them too. Excel is arguably the most (mis-)used BI tool on the planet and as much as they’ve tried, none of the BI vendors has succeeded in offering a solution that has similar flexibility combined with better manageability. A better solution that will persuade users to abandon Excel and switch to the new solution, not because they have to, but because they want to.

2. Fast & cheap soft- and hardware

Read the full article (C) Tholis consulting.