CM: THE NEXT GENERATION - The 2010s

around for a good SCM course.  You'll find the occasional course, perhaps very narrowly focused.  But until the industry consolidates terminology and practice significantly, it will be difficult to define adequate SCM courses.  However, this will happen in this decade.  The courses will help consolidate the standards and vice versa.  PLM and ITIL will find a software CM counterpart.

7. Reliability and Security
Reliability is a big issue today with CM tools.  This will cease to become an issue as the relative cost of unreliability will grow dramatically.  Scalability, a key challenge of reliability, will be addressed by improving technology. And alongside reliability will be significant advances in managing the security of data.  Integrated data encryption technologies, at-rest encryption, user-level and role-based data protection, and more will come to play a bigger role.

8. CM/SW Design Synergy
The line between CM and SW Design will begin to blur as CM tools start to address SW architecture and design support issues.  For example, searching through multiple revisions of source code, and searching through a specific configuration lineup will move search functions from the IDE to the CM tool.  Support of product variants will be primarily a design issue but strongly supported through a CM framework.  CM tools will be used to simultaneously support multiple views of a web site, based on the user context.  There are many other design areas that will merge with the more advanced CM tools of the 2010s.

9. Zero Administration
A few CM solutions require almost no administration.  Some of these provide a narrow CM scope, but some provide a wide ALM scope.  In the coming decade, if there's a need for administration, the CM tool will fall out of the market.  The cost is too high and there will be a sufficient number of solution alternatives that require no administration.  This means easy install, easy upgrades, fast roll-out, and no need for a day-to-day administrator.

10. Significant Price Drops
CM product licenses will see significant price drops across the industry over the next decade.  Investment in high price solutions will be justified only where the total cost of ownership can be show to be low.  Consulting and training rates won't change much, but  hopefully there will be a lower requirement for each.  Open Source solutions will get squeezed here because, although they will continue to evovle, their architectures will limit how quickly they can advance in the market.  As prices fall in the market, the savings of using open source will decrease significantly.

So there they are at a glance.  My 10 predictions for the 10 years of the '10s.  10 for the 10's.  So what am I missing?  Or where have I made my mistakes?   Let's review it again in 10 years to see how I did!