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What is the best time for a technology revolution? Just when your company has gotten up to date. Or so it seems. But the prediction earlier this month by the cofounder of SAP that there's a hardware revolution coming this year, ought to get everybody's attention. And we're talking about something that affects only the kinds of organizations that can run SAP's heavy-weight software.

A couple of elements he discussed may  not have immediate application at smaller accounting firms. These include in memory databases, which will operate more quickly than the current generation, and parallel processing on multi-core processors.

The other is much more obvious and that's what Plattner called the emergence of the telephone as the primary terminal for computing. It's already happened in Europe more than in the United States where laptop computers have been largely displaced by mobile devices.

What this represents is a shift away from what we have thought of as computers for the history of these devices. It's closer to the former Sun Microsystems slogan and philosophy that "The computer is the network" and that computers are not devices but processes that can operate by a wide variety of equipment that offer information input and retrieval capability.

The change also means that computing is about a lot more than word processing, spreadsheets and databases. There will be no need to think of applications are the products the consumers must master. Certainly, advertisements that demonstrate the ability of handhelds to control lights at a residence would suggest that it is these capabilities that spread computing far beyond its traditional role.

Uses will someday not need to understand computing processes, software applications, telecommunications and networks, but simply how to perform tasks and work.

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