The future revealed: What the year ahead holds for customers
By Network World Staff, Network World, 01/09/06
It's a new year, but the IT industry's expectations have a familiar ring.
Security will remain the top driver of IT infrastructure investments, following a year in which industry watchers logged 150,000
virus outbreaks. Wireless LANs (WLAN) will become more pervasive - at work, at home and in-between.
Multicore processors and virtualization technologies will transform data centers, and services-based development will transform
application environments.
For leading corporations, 2006 will be about accelerating their adoption of familiar technologies from pilot to production,
and tackling the IT governance issues that go along with these projects.
Security and more security
On the security front, authentication hardware will receive greater attention going forward, says Frank Gens, senior vice
president of research at IDC. In addition, unified threat management will increasingly dominate security appliances, he says.
Unified threat management refers to multifunction security devices that are able to create tunnels and make network-layer
admission decisions and that also have tools for spotting virus infections, spyware and unauthorized Internet traffic. Because
the firewall/VPN device is already stopping and filtering traffic, it makes sense to add software and hardware that does more
thorough inspections at the same access point. As users adopt these multifunction security devices, the popularity of stand-alone
firewall and VPN gear will drop.
The need for security technologies also will continue to influence the distribution of venture funds. Investors will focus
on companies with products designed to protect enterprises against insider threats.
"Outside threats are old news, it's now shifted to the inside, and it's a larger problem," says Michael Skok, general partner
with North Bridge Venture Partners.
Inside the data center, last year's newcomers - such as multicore processors and broader support for 64-bit computing - may
start making some real impact.
"In 2004 and 2005 we saw new technologies and approaches enter the [server] market as spending and growth began to resume.
In 2006, we shouldn't expect to see so many brand-new things, but rather the expansion and maturation of products and technologies
already in the market," says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata.
Server virtualization will continue to be popular, though it will be a few more years before the technology becomes standard
fare. To help move things in that direction, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices this year will introduce chips with baked-in
virtualization capabilities. This will be a first for the x86 platform, which until now has supported virtual environments
via some performance-draining tricks from vendors such as VMware and Microsoft.
