How a handful of the year’s biggest moves by enterprises and vendors will play out in 2007
In 2006, we saw enterprise IT executives bolster their technology infrastructures by ripping out the old and bringing in the new and, presumably, more powerful.
Texas university powers up with open source
This year, network executives at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) made one of the most powerful decisions an enterprise IT buyer can make — to oust a legacy vendor in favor of an open source competitor. The university began moving its 6,000 students, faculty and staff from Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and a Nortel Meridian PBX to Linux servers running Asterisk, which includes call-processing, voice mail and public-network gateway functionality.
This open source move lets SHSU operate its Cisco IP phones with more flexibility and at one-third the price, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at the Huntsville, Texas, school. While the open source alternative requires more on-site development expertise, Daniel says the tradeoff is worth it.
“The open source community has been an invaluable resource, but when it comes down to it, if you have competent developers, you can fix open source yourself, and support becomes less of an issue,” Daniel says. He also says the capabilities in products such as Asterisk should serve as a bellwether for vendors such as Cisco.
“From where I am sitting, it looks like closed-source solutions providers are starting to shake in their boots,” Daniel says. “If they don’t change their tune with practices and pricing, they are going to fall behind. Open source is here, it’s gaining steam and it’s happening in enterprise-grade deployments.”
Cisco builds its video presence
Cisco flexed its muscle in many ways this year, but especially interesting for its long-term implications was its show of might in the IP video fight. In a move industry watchers define as defensive, Cisco in October 2006 pulled the covers off its long-awaited TelePresence video communications technology, a combination of life-size displays and high-definition IP video.
“I have never seen Cisco react so quickly as it did to Microsoft’s unified communications platform,” says Zeus Kerravala, a Yankee Group vice president.
Cisco’s ultimate goal, he says, is to sell TelePresence to carriers for IPTV and content distribution networks. The technology would then trickle down to consumers, a market Cisco desperately wants to tap.
“Cisco has no more market share to steal in its core enterprise area. The consumer area is where the company sees growth and it is moving there,” Kerravala says. “2007 is going to be a year of transition for Cisco. The company is looking to change from ‘the network provider’ to a mainstream consumer application-oriented product provider and wants to be more in [the user’s] face.”
Microsoft’s big voice gambit
Microsoft forged a four-year strategic alliance with Nortel in a move industry watchers say could turn it into a serious voice contender in a way the company could not do on its own. Through their Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA), announced in July 2006, the companies will jointly develop, sell and deploy unified communications and VoIP technology to enterprises.
ICA proposes to transform Nortel’s VoIP features and call-control technology into software modules that will run on top of, or alongside, Microsoft unified communications servers. The companies also will develop technology to accelerate and prioritize Microsoft/Nortel unified communications traffic running on top of Nortel LAN, WAN and wireless network equipment.
For enterprise customers, the joint development could ultimately deliver voice mail, e-mail, calendar, mobility and other technologies in a unified format. “Enterprise customers could centralize communications and get economies of scale on their investments. Today many of those technologies are provided by multiple vendors, but if one vendor could unify them, that would deliver efficiencies,” says Matt Cain, a Gartner vice president. “Everything is wildly immature and unknown at Microsoft on the voice side, but that is where Nortel comes in and gives Microsoft the credibility,” he says.
Microsoft stakes an enterprise search claim
In another power play, Microsoft made clear it isn’t going to let Google, Yahoo or anyone else grab enterprise search business without a challenge. Toward that end, the company talked up how search features being developed in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista would integrate with a new desktop version of Windows Live Search and the MSN Internet service of the same name.
“Search is at a crossroads in the enterprise and Microsoft simply cannot ignore it — nor can anybody,” says Whit Andrews, a Gartner vice president. “Today everyone wants to interact with the data via a search box, no longer with menus or other means. The search box interface is as iconic now as point-and-click, menu-driven and command-line were for previous generations.”
Desktop search tools use local processing power to locate items inside e-mail and data stores. Three of the most popular are available for free from Google, MSN and Yahoo. Most industry watchers agree the products aid productivity: From a single interface, users can quickly search the text of their e-mail, contacts, application documents, data files, multimedia files and more.
“We are going to see an increased emphasis from Microsoft in 2007 on unification of its search perspective,” Andrews says. “No one will be able to top Microsoft, except Google, in its ability to deliver search capabilities on the desktop, enterprise and the Web.”
VMware muscles up as competition increases
With server virtualization encroachers coming from all corners, VMware strengthened its leadership position with release of its third-generation product, VMware Infrastructure 3. The package includes updated versions of ESX Server and VirtualCenter management tools and VMotion technology for running virtual machines among physical servers.
And, it’s the first step in VMware’s efforts to provide enhanced services on top of an increasingly reliable virtual foundation. The company has shifted its focus from providing an individual hypervisor that lets multiple operating systems run on a single physical system, to managing a collection of virtual machines running on those servers, to talking about virtualization across the data center and mapping applications dynamically to those resources, company officials say.
“We are proposing a completely new way of running the data center,” says Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s vice president of platform products.
That’s great news for users such as Mitch Davis, CIO at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, who want more from their virtualized server infrastructures. Already 60% virtual today, Bowdoin expects to have more than 80% of its infrastructure virtualized in a year, Davis says.
The university also is advancing its use of virtualization. For example, it is working with Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles to build out disaster-recovery and business-continuity sites at each other’s locations based on a virtual solution, he says. “This [type of cooperation] would not have been possible without virtualization,” he adds.
Enterprises zero in on accountability
With the world watching, many companies delivered a powerful message about data leaks and privacy as they axed top IT staff in response to security incidents.
AOL, Ohio University and the Department of Veterans Affairs made such moves. AOL fired a researcher and a manager, and the CTO resigned after the company posted data on search queries made by 650,000 subscribers. Ohio University dismissed two senior IT people following news of five security vulnerabilities that exposed the sensitive records of 137,000 alumni.
And, when a laptop containing data on 26 million veterans fell into a burglar’s hands, the analyst who took that laptop home was fired. The ongoing examination of the agency’s security practices has led to the departure of several other VA employees, including the CISO.
While the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory standards kicked off this trend, the corporate bottom line will keep it going through 2007, says John Pescatore, a Gartner vice president.
“If 80,000 customers have data exposed and stop doing business with your organization, someone needs to take the fall,” he says. “Now when the technology fails, the CTO, CIO will be gone. It’s hard to say there is a silver lining, but there will be more attention paid to what needs to be done to protect the organization in every way.”
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