* Predictions for the new year
Hold on to your hats – today we’ve polished the crystal ball and will make our top 10 predictions for 2005.
1. We believe that someone will actually define “Web services” in a way we can all understand. And Web services will get a lot of attention this year.
2. Video over IP will hit the consumer market, and the war between the cable companies and the telcos will make the French Revolution look like a tea party. Included in the arsenal for the telco: unbundled video programming. Included in the cable arsenal: taking enterprise market share from the telcos.
3. Vendors will actually deploy purpose-built IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architectural components instead of re-labeling existing equipment as IMS-compliant.
4. Enterprise applications will move from the desktop to the mobile environment, in part because mobile providers will treat enterprise users as something more than a big bunch of consumers.
5. 3G broadband wireless deployments will lay the foundation for cellular-based VoIP services.
6. Bring-your-own broadband VoIP services like those offered by AT&T and Vonage will continue to grow in geographic reach, but the cable companies offering both data transport and VoIP as an integrated service for businesses will be the real market alternative.
7. Triple-play and quadruple-play will continue to be important in the price-sensitive consumer and small-business market, but vertical applications support will be the real differentiator for midsized and large enterprises.
8. Information security will continue to be the biggest concern for the enterprise.
9. The newest problem will be digital rights management, and the oldest problem of network-to-network interfaces will be brought to the table again as applications management adds complexity between multiple provider networks.
10. VoIP might become even more popular than our newsletter, as measured by the raw numbers of subscribers to each service.
