I am sorry to say this is the last column of the Branch Office Best Practices newsletter. I want to first thank all of the readers for the past three years who have communicated with me, challenged me, and most importantly, who have used this forum as a way to improve their branch strategies. Second, I would like to leave you with some key "closing thoughts" on the trends and challenges I foresee for the branch, and my recommendations for addressing them.

1. The number of branch offices will continue to grow.
For the past five years, I have tracked the number of branch offices at organizations of all sizes. And every year (even this one!), the average change is a net gain. That gain ranges from 6.8% this year to 11.9% between 2006 and 2007. Despite the slowing economy, branch offices will continue to grow, whether they are the “branch of one,” or those telecommuting, or other more formal branch locations. Why? Because it’s less expensive to house employees in suburban branch locations than urban headquarters. It also results in better service to customers (particularly in industries such as insurance, banking, and retail). And, it reduces employee turnover, particularly in contact centers. The key for IT is to always plan for growth in the remote workforce by engaging in third-party services or the right management/monitoring tools to make sure IT supports employee productivity.

2. Managed services will play a larger role in branch offices.
If there are more people working remotely, there will be more demand for advanced, collaborative services. It will be challenging enough for IT staffs to keep the nuts-and-bolts of IT functioning properly, much less to implement, manage and troubleshoot new applications. I expect they will rely more on Managed Service Providers (including the carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Orange, Masergy, and Global Crossing, system integrators, such as IBM, EDS, and CSC, and the regional resellers, such as Dimension Data, Black Box, and Forsythe) to handle the nuts and bolts, and they will either keep applications implementation in-house, or rely upon hosted services.

3. Optimization technologies will become a must for efficient networking between locations.
With demands for bandwidth expected to grow 99% in 2009, companies must evaluate single-sided two-sided optimization, as well as application acceleration, load balancing, and caching. There are numerous players in these categories, including Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Crescendo, F5, Juniper, Riverbed, and SilverPeak.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.