TECHNOLOGY - March 29, 1994

An Alert Future: Between various California-bashing jokes, Aaron Goldberg, executive vice president of market researcher Computer Intelligence InfoCorp., gave his views on the computer industry’s future last week to the UCI Chief Executive Roundtable, a monthly breakfast meeting of technology executives in Irvine.

Among his predictions were the rise of “active systems,” or software that alerts somebody to the changing status of a business so that a decision can be made before it’s too late.

“So far, most software tells us what happened in the business, not what’s going to happen,” he said. “We need the kind of information that increases our knowledge of a company’s internal ecosystem.”

Goldberg said he expects the first prototypes of such systems to emerge in 1994 through 1996 with widespread releases by 1998.