Trends
What about Web 2.0 in 2008?
The enterprise Web 2.0 market will continue
to gain importance in 2008 as an increasing
number of firms look to Web 2.0 tools like
blogs, wikis and social networking to solve
long-standing information worker problems,
according to a recent report from Forrester
Research. As a result, Forrester expects to
see strong demand for tools like enterprise
RSS and social networking, along with an
increased role for IT departments in
technology acquisition.
"Web 2.0 stepped into the collaboration
and productivity market with a bang in
2007," says Forrester researcher G. Oliver
Young. "Enterprise Web 2.0 is now delivering
substantial business value around
collaboration and productivity and has
reached the 2008 priority list for many
enterprises."
This year, Forrester predicts:
IT departments will embrace Web
2.0 technologies. To date, most IT
departments have resisted Web 2.0 tools,
often viewing them as consumer grade, of
secondary concern to other major IT
investments or simply frivolous. Forrester
expects at least half of the 42 percent of
enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their
priority list to add it by year's end. "CIOs
will concede that they cannot quell
employees' use of consumer-oriented or SaaS
Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by
deploying enterprise-class tools in their
stead," explains Young. "For IT departments
aspiring to be more relevant to the
business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a
high-impact, low-cost method to show
leadership and innovation."
Trial deployments in 2007 will
deepen in 2008.
Forrester has seen the adoption of
enterprise Web 2.0 tools consistently follow
a tried-and-true pattern: technology
investigation, experimentation, rollout to
small groups or teams and finally widespread
adoption. The vast majority of deployments
followed this pattern in 2007.
RSS demand will grow
substantially. In 2007, interest in
the RSS "publish and subscribe" architecture
grew as firms sought to syndicate internal
content such as RFP requests, blog postings,
wiki changes and CRM data. Today, an average
enterprise RSS deployment runs between
$80,000 and $100,000, and unless this price
drops closer to the $30,000 to $50,000
range, many potential buyers will be unable
to justify the expense.
Mashups will mature and eat into
other major markets. "Enterprise
mashups will move from a few one-off pilots
to true enterprise-class software in the
coming 12 months," Young says. "There will
be no shortage of volatility on the supply
side as mashups begin to take large bites
out of the RSS, portal, search and
enterprise application integration markets.
Social networking will grab much
of the limelight. Forrester is
getting inquiries on how firms should
approach social networking, both to lock it
out and to embrace it for employees. Expect
the adoption of social networking solutions
for business to accelerate dramatically in
2008 with many firms looking for internal
social networking solutions.
"Web 2.0 has radically changed the way
people interact with both information and
one another on the Internet," Young says.
"Now it's coming to an enterprise near you.
The value is its ability to more efficiently
generate, self-publish and find information,
plus share expertise in a way that's easier
and cheaper than earlier
knowledge-management attempts."
International roaming charges: $693
U.S. businesses pay a high cost in mobile
phone roaming fees when employees travel
internationally. A study conducted for
global cellular communications provider
Brightroam by research company Harris
Interactive reveals that international
roaming fees can cost U.S. businesses $693
per trip for every traveler. Surprisingly,
few U.S. businesses report plans to look for
more affordable options.
"The study shows that 15 percent of
employees make at least one international
trip per year," says Jeff Wilson, general
manager of Brightroam. "If you consider that
many large businesses in the U.S. employ
more than 30,000 employees, it is easy to
see how roaming costs can take a big bite
out of operating costs."
The majority of respondents to the survey
(89 percent) agree that roaming costs are
overpriced, but most (61 percent) also
report no plans to switch international
roaming providers in the coming year. The
report revealed that some decision makers
have limited visibility into their company's
average roaming costs per month. From 34
percent to 44 percent (depending on the
company size) report that employees expense
their roaming charges versus using a
centralized billing system.
"These trends align with our findings,"
says Joe Basili, vice president of research
at the Association of Telecom Management
Professionals (AOTMP). "Wireless expenses
are raging out of control for enterprises."
Research by AOTMP has found that enterprises
often do not have enough information on
their telecom expenses to identify the best
opportunities to reduce these charges.
The study also uncovered other business
travel trends, including:
- Four out of five companies report
cell phones or smart phones are the
primary communication tool used when
employees travel internationally and 57
percent of all calls made on a trip are
made on these devices.
- Users are more likely to use a cell
phone rather than a landline phone,
whether they are calling locally, to
another country or back to the United
States. If not using their cell phone,
three-fifths will use a calling card and
half will use the hotel phone.
- Almost half (46 percent) of
companies subscribe to a domestic cell
phone service that uses both GSM and
CDMA.
Security still not a priority
Companies in the technology, media and
entertainment, and telecommunications
industries are overconfident and
under-prepared to prevent security breaches,
according to a study by consulting firm
Deloitte. In a global security survey of
more than 100 such organizations, 46 percent
do not have a formal information-security
strategy in place. Despite this lack of a
formal security strategy, 69 percent report
they are "very confident" or "extremely
confident" about their organization's
effectiveness at tackling external security
challenges.
With more people working outside the
office, businesses should adopt an
end-to-end security strategy that spans the
extended enterprise, according to Rena
Mears, Deloitte's global and U.S. privacy
and data protection leader. This model
requires that enterprises pay close
attention to the security of their mobile
workers, as well as the security
capabilities of their business partners.
The study also revealed a concern among
respondents in the area of insider threats,
with only 56 percent displaying confidence
in addressing employee misconduct, whether
it is deliberate or accidental. In addition,
the convergence of physical and information
security is another area most of the polled
companies have not yet addressed, with 64
percent of respondents indicating they have
done little or nothing to integrate the two.
The number of chief information security
officers (CISOs) appointed in the companies
surveyed increased from 57 percent to 65
percent in the past year. The survey
revealed that only 13 percent of CISOs have
tenure of more than 10 years, with 39
percent having held a CISO position for just
three to five years.
"In order to get ahead of the problem,
businesses must increase their security
efforts and investments and think more
strategically than simply reacting to
emerging threats," says Mears.
SHORT TAKES
Watchful eyes
Vicon Industries' camera
domes and pan-and-tilt drives have been
chosen to be part of an integrated
video-surveillance system to be installed at
Beijing National Stadium, where the
opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008
Summer Olympics, as well as some of the
athletic events, will be held. Vicon
SurveyorVFT day/night PTZ domes with 23x
optical zoom will be a key component of the
system. In addition, Vicon pan-and-tilt
drives will be used to provide operational
stability for a variety of other
manufacturers' cameras. "Olympic officials
claim that, when completed, the National
Stadium will be the largest enclosed space
in the world," says J.C. Caine,
international sales manager at Vicon.
Faith secured
Faith Baptist Bible College and
Theological Seminary in Ankeny,
Iowa, has selected the ConSentry
Networks LANShield solution to
ensure regulatory compliance and provide
security for its approximately 600 students,
staff and faculty. Because it stores
personal and medical information about its
students, George Dougherty,
chief technology officer at Faith Baptist,
wanted to provide the highest level of
security to ensure regulatory compliance. "I
was delighted to see that running all the
traffic through the system had no impact on
network speed," Dougherty says.
WLAN in NM
The public school system in Santa
Fe,, N.M., is deploying wireless
local-area networks (WLANs) from
Meru Networks that will provide
wireless coverage for 35 buildings and some
14,500 students, faculty and staff. Santa Fe
Public Schools will extend wireless coverage
district-wide to its three high schools,
four middle schools, 19 elementary schools
and various administration buildings.
John Phaklides, director of
technology for Santa Fe Public Schools, says
the highly mobile nature of school
populations, along with the inherent
limitations of wired networks, are driving
the move to district-wide wireless.
Healthy system
Sharp HealthCare, a San
Diego regional integrated healthcare
delivery system, has selected
Foundry Network's edge-to-core
networking solution, which includes NetIron
core routers, FastIron Power over Ethernet (PoE)
ready-edge and aggregation switches and
ServerIron application delivery switches.
Sharp required a networking solution that
provided redundancy, resilience and
increased performance. "Sharp is committed
to implementing technology that not only
lowers total cost of ownership, but improves
information access and empowers employees to
provide the highest levels of medical care
and support," says
William Spooner, senior
vice president and CIO for Sharp HealthCare.