On the hardware and network side however, Moore’s Law (that predicted thirty years back that the power of microprocessors would double every eighteen months) continues to hold and expected to continue for another decade. Fundamental design ideas including Pen Computing, Tablet PC, internet-integrated phone and internet appliances are maturing. LCD displays are becoming several folds cheaper and better.

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Configurable hardware, alternative ways of manufacturing silicon wafer, new generation materials to replace silicon, high density packing to boost storage several hundred fold, bio-computing, bio-sensors are still hot areas of research. Native optical switching that would provide thousand-fold increase in bandwidth is maturing and will be part of standard products soon. On the tools, programming and application development side, new generation programming languages such as c#, and language-independent application development through Common Language Runtime are reaching the marketplace. Attempts to generate code from models direct through the notion of Executable Unified Modelling Language are being pursued as vigorously as ever. If we take the content side, next generation font technologies are maturing. Next generation search engines that would give orders of magnitude speed of search, even with several hundred-fold increase in the number of web pages are being researched. Semantic web that would make the content stored on the internet into an “intelligent store”, compared to a huge connected information store that is accessed through intelligent search tools today, is being heavily researched by the very person who invented World Wide Web and his team at W3C at MIT.

In a more fundamental way, quantum computing ideas are coming out of the labs into first generation products. In short, IT is as hot as ever (though much less hype and in the process more serious work gets done).

IT is an enabler for every industry — banking, financial, services, automotive, oil, iron & steel, travel, tourism and health, to name only a few. With hardware becoming a commodity and affordable, computer literacy improving significantly, resistance to computer receding from peoples’ minds, and the ubiquity of internet access, computerisation in most areas including government is bound to increase over the years. The IT Association of America has predicted a shortage of more than 100,000 IT professionals by the year 2003. Each of the top three Indian software companies — TCS, Infosys and Wipro has bagged large contracts — worth more than $ 100 million dollars — recently. State Bank of India and Union Bank of India have planned IT investments running into several hundreds of crore this year. Large US companies such as EDS, i2 and Cisco plan to add 1,000-5,000 jobs each in the next three years. Indian software companies Infosys, Wipro and TCS plan to add several thousands over the next three years.

India in general and Indian IT companies in particular continue to be at the centre stage of IT. Competition from China is real, yet there is nothing to be alarmed about. The healthy competition from China would turn Indian IT companies into better performers (though some of the poorly performing Indian companies will vanish). IT-Enabled Services is growing faster than software industry. ITES today is not medical transcription, claims processing, and data entry alone. It includes call centres for financial transaction processing, marketing, customer support, technical support and consulting support. It would soon include design engineering services, support for software components, analytics support and high end data analysis (data mining). Given these positive developments, there is no reason for students, professionals and the common man to think that the IT field is practically finished.

Professor S Sadagopan is the Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. The views expressed here are personal. He can be contacted at ss@iiitb.ac.in