What are Your Predictions for 2011? (and Happy Holidays!)

First, we’d like to wish all our ZapFlash readers, friends, colleagues, customers, and everyone else a happy holiday season! With business slowing over the next week or so as people get together with family and friends and take some needed time off, this is a good opportunity to catch up on some reading (hint hint) and also think about what the next year will bring.

What are YOUR Predictions?

ZapThink usually puts together an annual recap of the previous year, ranking our previous year’s predictions and making new ones for the year ahead. And this year will be no exception — stay tuned for that in our next ZapFlash. However, we thought that this year we’d like to turn the tables a bit and hear from you what your predictions are for the next year. Will the Cloud concept reach new heights (can you even have clouds in the troposphere?) or will it crash to earth as fog? Will governance become all-encompassing as companies start to realize their exposure to risk or will business process become the new enterprise focus du jour? What role will vendors play in 2011? Will they continue to consolidate and dominate the EA and SOA conversation or will the emergence of a plethora of mobile, SaaS, Cloud, and other vendors start to chip away at their hegemony?

And what about the ZapThink 2020 Supertrends? Will we start to see progress on Deep Interoperability in 2011? Will companies start to make inroads in their efforts to enable complex systems and the agility benefits that emerge? Will non-IT users finally get the upper hand as tools and technologies enable the democratization of technology? Will the corporate walls finally dissolve as organizations realize that the Global Cubicle enables a radical rethink of organizational structure? And will companies finally grok Location Independence and realize that the location of the Cloud (private, public) matters less than what the Cloud does and how it behaves?

Will more ZapThink 2020 Crisis Points rear their ugly heads in 2011? Certainly 2010 has been a year where Cyberwar has gone from fantasy to reality as Stuxnet and Wikileaks emerged as front page news. Will enterprises stop paying for and doing their own IT? Will EA frameworks continue their downward slide in influence? Will IPv4 exhaustion lead to a move to IPv6 and the associated proliferation of net-connected devices along with a whole new slew of potential security risks and threats? Will Gen Y’s workforce dominance push organizations to close the digital divide in 2011? Will the exponential expansion in data finally bust the damns of enterprise IT storage, management, and analytical capability? And will enterprise applications  fall under the weight of their size, cost, and complexity in the face of nimble and focused competition?

Or do you have other predictions on topics not mentioned above? We’d like to hear from you. Post a comment below or your own blog post. We’ll feature the best comments and link to your posts, even if we don’t necessarily agree with them. We’ve been wrong many times, so this is a good opportunity to see the wisdom of our crowd. With well over 20,000 readers of the ZapFlash, and lots more if you include our syndication partners, perhaps some group insight will emerge that has eluded us all.