The third generation is about personalisation, individualisation and automation. The move to the Web will be accompanied by a revolution in application software. You don't want to rip out your company database and start from scratch. This led to a discussion about how large corporations scale businesses. The Meta Group is saying you need ten times the performance you think you need.
Clusters are also one way to scale.
Priestley seemed to suggest that corporations that had already chosen Risc architectures for their mission control systems will need to think hard about their strategy in the future. We will have a range of solution stacks from day one on 64-bit. Security is another important area. Priestley also spent some time discussing Infiniband, the trade organisation striving to create a future IO which will boldly deliver high bandwidth where no high bandwidth has boldly been delivered before. It would essentially be a plug and play system for servers, he suggested.