LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – With many keeping one eye on Hurricane Wilma churning off the coast, 6,000 IT executives last week heard Gartner analysts offer their vision on everything from security trends to wireless network directions.
The Gartner Symposium and IT Expo 2005 also brought out 190 vendors and included keynote presentations from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, HP CEO Mark Hurd and Dell CEO Michael Dell.
Ballmer said he believes his company has ironed out all of the security problems in its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system so that users can consider adopting it the first day it is released – for the most part.
“Most people will trust it from day one on their home computer, and then they will have to decide about their corporate [PC]. I encourage you to get it early, but I must be honest among friends,” Ballmer said.
In a wide-ranging chat with Gartner analysts, Ballmer touched on some of the prominent topics surrounding Microsoft this year, including its all-out effort to improve security, the competitive threat from Linux and Google, and delays in Vista.
Formerly known by its Longhorn code name, Vista was originally supposed to be available by now as an ambitious upgrade to Windows XP. It was supposed to include a new file system and a new presentation surface, among other features, but Microsoft was unable to make sure all the new components would interoperate in time for its current launch date, the second half of next year, Ballmer said. Instead, Microsoft decided to roll out those components over time after the launch. This also gives the company’s developers time to run code through tools designed to probe for security weaknesses, Ballmer said. “We are in the middle of the best pipeline of products we’ve ever had.”
The security concern
But Microsoft’s security issues weren’t the only safety challenges that attracted attention.
Once books close on 2005, spending on security is expected to have increased 16% annually over the past two years, or four times the rate of overall IT spending. That security splurge is unsustainable for most customers, said Gartner Vice President John Pescatore.
To get more secure and spend less, companies should focus on process, not products, said Neil MacDonald, vice president at Gartner. “Businesses should increase the efficiency of the security program either by reducing the percentage of revenue that goes toward security spending or increasing the amount of protection from established security spending levels. And also increase the effectiveness of the security program, reducing the number of successful incidents or providing security controls that don’t interfere with business missions.”
Pescatore added that network-based intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) are mature and should be deployed. On the other hand, he did not recommend the widespread use of host-based IPS, because it’s more difficult to control what’s happening at the desktop level.
He added that the new breed of all-in-one security devices could be a good fit for small or midsize businesses or for remote offices or retail branches of a large company, but said all-in-one appliances don’t have the performance to handle security for a large corporate headquarters.
Companies should have anti-spyware software on every desktop, but customers should not pay extra for it, MacDonald said. They should demand that their existing desktop anti-virus vendor simply add anti-spyware as an additional feature.
The changing face of IT
In the area of compliance, analyst John Bace presented research showing that compliance-related activities eat up a huge chunk of IT budgets. In a Gartner survey of 900 CIOs, respondents said they’re planning to allocate 11% of their total project budget to compliance, and that’s expected to hit 14% by 2009.
Several analysts tried to predict how the IT function will be changing over the next several years. Diane Morello suggested that IT professionals need to become more versatile. Morello identified four areas of expertise that will be vital for IT professionals in the next few years: technology infrastructure services, information design and management, process design and management, and relationship and sourcing management.
She said IT professionals will need to move beyond simply helping the business achieve its goals by providing the underlying infrastructure. They need to drive the business forward by proposing ways that technology and technology-enabled applications can cut costs and increase revenue.
More specifically, she encouraged IT executives in the audience to go back to their companies and develop new mobile and wireless applications and services or design reusable software components or figure out new ways to make use of unstructured data.
Morello recommended that people start on the road to becoming a “versatilist” by getting involved with groups outside of IT, learning about other disciplines, such as financial analysis, and building a strong network that includes people inside the company, as well as external customers and partners.
Hurd says HP on the right track
Convincing customers and partners HP is on the right track were the main points of HP’s Hurd.
Hurd tried to deflect rumors that the company would soon sell one or two divisions – namely, its printer and network divisions. Hurd said HP would focus on its core products lines and wouldn’t spin off any divisions.
Hurd said he is committed to HP’s adaptive enterprise framework, developed by his predecessor, Carly Fiorina. But he was critical of the management structure that grew during her nearly six-year tenure.
It was a management process that “at its lunatic conclusion” had the CEO acting as a tiebreaker in pricing disagreements between the product group and a customer-facing group, Hurd said. “After careful analysis, I determined it was a bad model,” he said, to audience chuckles.
Beyond the keynote addresses and session information, Gartner analysts made many key prognostications. Those include:
Customers should watch for the next generation of firewalls – expected around 2007 – to combine traditional firewall protection plus intrusion prevention and other more advanced features. “Integrating these functions, which are largely separate boxes today will be an important step for users,” Pescatore said. “It’s very likely that vendors who haven’t done anything with IPS in the past [will] use it in these next generation firewalls to climb into the enterprise arena.”
The many wireless networks make it difficult for users to move seamlessly between the different wired and wireless networks. Wi-Fi and wired LANs will be the first to come together as Wi-Fi controllers integrated in Ethernet switches. Cellular sets with Wi-Fi radios will enable users to choose Wi-Fi for bandwidth-intensive data applications. Wi-Fi roaming, QoS and power management will be required for true voice over Wi-Fi. The emergence of WiMAX will make fixed wireless access close in speed to wired alternatives. The use of unified memory architecture technologies will allow Global System for Mobile Communications and code division multiple- access voice traffic to be transported over Wi-Fi networks. IP Multimedia Subsystem will permit the convergence of wired and wireless service provider backbone networks, making the delivery of services applications and content available on either network.
Virtualization technologies will increase the ability to effectively consolidate larger resources. Virtualization also will make distributed resources easier to manage, reprovision and use efficiently. Several changes will make virtualization critical to most companies in the next few years: processor capability has outpaced the performance requirements of many applications, and performance is relatively inexpensive, making overhead of a virtualization layer a non-issue. While processing power is becoming less expensive, space, power, installation, integration and administration are not inexpensive – and cost the same whether a resource is 10% or 90% utilized. The greatest inhibitor to any form of server virtualization is software pricing and licensing.
Tom Krazit of the IDG New Service contributed to this report.
