Tech moves that matter - for good and bad

On balance, 2007 was a pretty good year for the network industry. Some might even say many companies hit their stride this year, finally shaking off the torpor of the dot-com bust.

"In technology, we go in cycles," says Josh Hinkle, manager of network management and security for the American Heart Association, in Camp Hill, Pa. "And we’re in one of those cycles again where we’re ramping up. After the boom of the late ‘90s, we leveled off and people weren’t hiring or paying as much, and there wasn’t much innovative technology happening.

"But now, companies have decided they’ll invest. So everyone is starting to innovate with technology again and companies are buying into that innovation."

And some of those innovations were things the industry clearly got right in 2007. For example, the focus on virtualization, collaboration, next-generation carrier networks and green network initiatives all landed on the "right" side of this year’s good/bad ledger.

The bright side

1. Virtualization

Virtualization really hit the mainstream in 2007. In addition to the hugely successful VMware IPO (see "The smartest and dumbest moves of 2007"), which put virtualization on Wall Street’s map, more enterprises began not only implementing virtualization, but also finding innovative ways to tailor it to their businesses.

"Adoption of virtualization by far has been one of the better moves we had in 2007," Hinkle says. "We looked at virtualization, and that led us to look at WAN optimization and data shaping. And we realized we could get rid of services in remote areas that we don’t want to support, and give people speedy access to our central location where they can reach not only their one server, but true enterprise applications. Virtualization is really making things happen here."

2. Collaboration

This year the industry got collaboration right, too — or at least this is the year when new and emerging collaborative technologies, such as blogs and wikis, actually gained an enterprise toehold. (Learn more about Collaboration products from our Collaboration Buyer's Guide.) Although the verdict is still out on the value of consumer-based social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace (see sidebar), the collaborative tools they popularized are fast making inroads, and that’s all good, experts say.

"Where I work, all of our documents are in wiki and SharePoint," says Michael Morris, technical team lead and network architect at a $3 billion high-tech company and a Cisco Subnet blogger. "I’m a big fan of wiki because of its ease of use, its openness and its simplicity. It makes sense."

By embedding wikis and blogs in SharePoint 2007, Microsoft also helped get collaboration right, says Susan Hanley, an independent consultant and a Microsoft Subnet blogger. "Because [SharePoint 2007] makes it so easy to take advantage of emerging collaborative technologies, it gives enterprises an opportunity to start a dialog with executives who may not have been exposed to wikis and blogs or who may not have been willing to try them. Now, it’s so easy to do, it lets them see the value of using the technology," she says.