Dzubeck on the year ahead: What's hot for 2007

Set to explode in 2007: Cisco video, VoIP, data center consolidation, SOA and much more

Looking even a year ahead into the network future can be a daunting task. For example, three years ago at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates, then Microsoft’s chairman, boldly predicted the problem of spam on the Internet would be solved by 2006.

Recent studies, however, indicate worldwide spam traffic doubled in 2006 and now accounts for nine of 10 e-mail messages sent on the Internet.

Macro business issues will continue to dominate telecommunications and network infrastructure in 2007, and the big will get bigger through an aggressive M&A strategies. In 2007, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission modifications to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations will occur, to the cheers of corporate America and the jeers of the accounting profession.

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Looking even a year ahead into the network future can be a daunting task. For example, three years ago at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates, then Microsoft’s chairman, boldly predicted the problem of spam on the Internet would be solved by 2006.

Recent studies, however, indicate worldwide spam traffic doubled in 2006 and now accounts for nine of 10 e-mail messages sent on the Internet.

Macro business issues will continue to dominate telecommunications and network infrastructure in 2007, and the big will get bigger through an aggressive M&A strategies. In 2007, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission modifications to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations will occur, to the cheers of corporate America and the jeers of the accounting profession.

The financial community is abuzz with renewed IPO interest in IPOs because the SEC has relaxed its reporting rules for SOX and 10-K filings. The aggressive return of network and computer industry IPOs may finally occur this year.

Meanwhile, Cisco has made it official: Virtualization has brought to reality the phrase “the network is the computer,” and video convergence (for example, telepresence, conferencing, instant messaging, surveillance) will drive the network industry to ever-greater demand for low-latency bandwidth.

In the corporate world, we will see the continuing advance of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Cisco will finally get religion and amalgamate its Services Network Oriented Architecture (SONA) with SOA. With adoption becoming universal rather than sporadic, SOA is a corporate reality. No architecture is static, and in 2007 we will see the SOA with information services and master data management (MDM).

To accommodate this evolution it’s critical that a standardized enterprise services bus (ESB) be selected within the corporate SOA. The ESB becomes the corporate control plane for all IT applications and effectively the spinal cord for corporate business processes. MDM virtualization, synchronization of information demands and real-time requirements for grid-based corporate analytics will accelerate SOA’s next evolution, which requires increased network reliability, security and accessibility coupled with low latency and high bandwidth.