Corporate interest focuses on networks

Rethink IT, Dec, 2004

Networking is the key theme of this month's issue. After a downturn in investment in networks, caused by recession, the telecoms slump and by disappointment with wireless security, high performance backbones and other technologies, enterprises are expected to take out their chequebooks again from 2005. New applications such as video-based collaboration; IT methods such as grid computing; the increasing trend towards mobile enterprises--all these are demanding new approaches and higher capacity.

The demand for bandwidth is luring Juniper down from its carrier markets into the corporate space, going head-to-head with Cisco and sparking rumors that the router maker will seek to acquire a rival such as Foundry. Juniper is also touting its concept of the Infranet, in which carriers create a seamless network for enterprise services, like the internet in shape but with greater security.

This will be boosted by new rules in the US that are encouraging a major fiber and broadband wireless build-out by the major telcos, eyeing enterprise services as well as the mass consumer market. And some innovative ISPs are offering corporate users a lower cost alternative to T1 and other leased lines in the US, using broadband wireless technologies based on the upcoming WiMAX standard.

Not everything is rosy, on the networks front though. Wireless Lan makers are still confusing and deterring business users with inflated claims about fast 'pre-standard' products, and there are new fears about security, despite the release of new authentication and encryption standards. And managing the devices, security and people in a mobile enterprise remains a headache, though one that Nokia and others are racing to solve.

The mobile enterprise trend will breed a new class of end user devices too, which will start to impact the notebook and PC makers from 2005. Change is happening already as smartphones and PDAs merge, and notebooks get ever smaller, PalmOne looks set to make its first Windows device, helping to hand the whole corporate mobile device market to Microsoft on a plate. More radically, new developments such as personal data servers will start to change the face of the PC as we know it.

Away from networking, another key trend is to use Java application servers in large enterprise deployments. While the likes of IBM, BEA and Sun can use these as a key weapon against Microsoft, they are themselves being challenged by increasingly robust offerings from the open source community, such as JBoss. Java, backbone and wireless networking, new compact devices and a heavy use of managed communications services--as this issues shows, these will be among the key areas of investment and concern for the CIO as we head towards 2005.