This time of year, people make predictions about what the coming year will bring, and in technology circles that comes down to things like, "Next year will be the year of [name the technology]."

Next year will almost certainly not be the year of NAC, and quite possibly there will be no year of NAC, but that’s nothing against NAC.

Lots of technologies never get their year. Look at videoconferencing. It has been about to boom for 15 years, but instead it grows steadily. Businesses aren’t shifting their travel budgets to the IT department with instructions to spend it on telepresence gear.

There’s probably a pretty convincing return on investment story for videoconferencing, but even with increasing airfares and concern about carbon footprints, apparently the ROI argument is not compelling enough for a spike in demand.

NAC faces an even tougher road. Being lumped in with network security, NAC is used to make things not happen, which is tough to quantify. In some settings – notably colleges – IT executives testify to dramatic declines in network infections, help desk calls and registration times for student machines, so there can be ROI.

But in other settings with fewer unmanaged machines and more security-conscious users, the benefits are less dramatic, and so the argument is less compelling. NAC is great for mitigating risk that devices represent when they join the network. Good, but how do you measure that?

NAC vendors seem to know these challenges, and are adapting. Rather than selling separate systems deployed as appliances and agents, they are integrating with other security platforms and network devices – endpoint security suites, firewalls, routers, VPN gateways, etc. NAC is a natural supplement to other technologies, another layer in a security architecture.

NAC will always be useful, and it’s not going to get its own year, but in a beauty pageant it might win Miss Congeniality.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.