IBM Research 2006 Global Technology Outlook

Ton Engbersen, Senior Manager Server Technologies Research, IBM Zürich Research Laboratory

 

Abstract: The Global Technology Outlook (GTO) is IBM Research's vision of the future for information technology (IT) and its impact on industries that use IT. It highlights emerging software, hardware, and services technology trends that are expected to significantly impact the IT sector in the next 3-7 years. In particular, the GTO identifies technologies that may be disruptive to an existing business, have the potential to create new opportunity, and can provide new business value to our customers. In this year, the GTO focuses on: (1) the future of silicon technology and the challenges to be solved so the IT industry can reckon with Silicon Technology for another decade or so, (2) what will be the impact of an increasingly sensor-driven world on IT, (3) with a leveling-off of silicon growth rates, especially in speed, are there different and more efficient ways to deliver applications to the market, (4) is there a change in how software will be developed, driven by the rapid evolution of web-based tools and ease-of-use of the web and (5) how will web 2.0 impact business services by accelerating the move to services composition especially for small and medium businesses.

In this talk a few of these topics will be discussed, and augmented with selected research topics of the Systems group in the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

About the speaker: Ton Engbersen received his master in EE from the Technical University Eindhoven, Netherlands in 1978 and his PhD from the ETH-Zurich in 1983, while also working part-time for the Image Processing group at IBM in Ruschlikon. He was instrumental in bringing VLSI design skills to the laboratory in the mid-80s, and in the early 90s developed the PRIZMA switch architecture. PRIZMA has become a family of communication switch offerings that IBM is marketing through its IBM Microelectronics Division. In 1996/97 he spent two years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, where he led the initial development of MPLS. Since 1997, he has been managing the Network Technology Research Group at the Zurich Research Laboratory. His current research interests are in networking technology, network processing, scaleable switching technology and SDH/Sonet and recently Server I/O Networks. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and is currently serving on the Technology Council of this Academy.