Forecasts: With this year almost over, the time is once again here to predict what the next will bring. XP’s reprieve reigns on the throne of Top 10 IT predictions for 2008. So do the greening of tech, a major international hacking incident, and growing pains for social networking, to name just a few. “Turns out we did pretty well culling the wheat from the chaff last year and gazing ahead, though maybe we weren’t bold enough in our declarations. So, this year we’ll stretch a little,” writes Nancy Weil of the IDG News Service. Columnist’s corner: What, prey tell, is zinc whisker infestation? A senior management that doesn’t like to have its questionable practices challenged found that out, the hard way. Our Off the Record author’s company needed new tiles for a raised datacenter floor and, after recommending a product and vendor they previously used, was told my one Mr. Pinchpenny that they should, instead, use some tiles wasting away in a company warehouse. You know, to save a few bucks. “Several months later, a couple of our servers suddenly stopped in their tracks … A few months later, the same thing happened again.” So they called in a specialist. That’s where the aforementioned zinc whisker infestation comes in. The tiles, you see, had galvanized steel edging which made direct contact with the anodized aluminum frame that holds up the computer floor, thus causing the outages. “To my knowledge, none of us actually saw any of the whiskers, yet a quick Web search reveals that they’ve been a known issue — since 1948.” Apps: The latest in a long line of recent BI moves comes this week in the form of SAP’s deal with Visual Numerics (VNI), under which SAP will embed VNI’s libraries of algorithms for predictive analytics and forecasting into a NetWeaver component. “So, not only are the big guys buying up the smaller BI guys, they are also enhancing their BI with BA (business analytics), aka forecasting — once the domain of two major players, SAS and SPSS,” Ephraim Schwartz explains in Plotting the future of business intelligence. These events, Schwartz continues, tell us that it “may have taken five or 10 years for the enterprise to understand the significance of BI, but once BI was adopted, the learning curve proved short, and now that enterprises have seen the light, they want more. The enterprise does not only want the ability to look back; it wants the ability to look forward.” Software Development