Finding the Hot Technologies of 2003

But that doesn't mean the news is all bad for solution providers; more than a few promising technologies have risen from the ashes. No doubt, 2003 is likely to be another difficult year for this industry, but there are still plenty of places to make a decent living selling

the right mix of products and services. To help you find the hottest technologies for the coming year, VARBusiness has put together this special annual issue, The State of Technology (SOT) report, which goes in-depth on seven technology growth areas that are critical for solution providers to understand inside and out.

To prepare this report, we asked solution providers about their technology choices and preferences regarding products, services and solutions. A common theme across all technologies is an increasing client dependence on consulting services. That mandates solution providers be ahead of the technology curve at a whole new level.

What follows is an overview of the important technologies this issue covers.

Look, Ma, No Strings

Clearly, one of the biggest winners in the past year has been wireless networks. (Our story on wireless deployment in the health-care industry begins on page 62.) As users become more mobile, as more laptops migrate between home and work, and as new devices appear with built-in network connectivity, wireless networks will continue to be in demand. Even better, wireless networks offer recurring revenue opportunities for solution providers. Managing them, creating a secure computing environment, and migrating clients from slower, older technologies to one of several new upgrades that improve performance and enhance security are all examples. And as standards gel and new products appear that support the 802.11 alphabet soup, these complexities represent additional roles for solution providers to clarify, recommend and choose the right mix of wireless products for their customers.

Speaking of security, network-security technologies will also see continued signs of improvement in the coming year. (Our story on the many different approaches to locking down your clients' networks begins on page 54.) As the number of hackers, virus authors and script kiddies climbs, networks need to upgrade their defense systems to prevent attacks on their corporate IT data centers. In fact, the vast majority of solution providers selling or influencing security technologies are deploying antivirus software (85 percent), according to our SOT research. True, antivirus software has almost become a commodity, but with more and more choices of how to provide protection for individual desktops and enterprisewide networks, there are new opportunities for solution providers to tighten up this line of defense and sell more consulting services.

In addition, as more remote users obtain broadband Internet access, that same level of security,or better,will need to extend to laptops as well. In fact, more than half the solution providers we surveyed say their organizations are likely to deploy remote or broadband Internet access in their customer solutions.

The Network Niche

Another one of the year's bigger trends has been the adoption of Gigabit Ethernet technologies and protocols for both desktops and servers. (Our story on gigabit deployment to the desktop begins on page 47.) This year, 15 percent of desktop deployments and nearly 18 percent of server deployments supported gigabit nodes, according to our SOT research,not surprising given the performance gains the technology offers. As corporations make use of IP telephony systems and require faster networks for transporting graphics, video and audio data, gigabit upgrades for an entire network infrastructure unveil a lucrative opportunity for solution providers.

Complementing Gigabit Ethernet are speedier network-attached printers. (Our story on evaluating the latest crop of color printers begins on page 80.) Nearly nine in 10 VARs deploying printing technologies (87 percent) are currently reselling or recommending network print servers, according to our SOT research. The real story about these printers, however, isn't speeds and feeds, but how to manage an entire enterprise of printers and the changing ways that users interact with them. Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox all have multiple offerings to help solution providers bring order to the chaos, including updated drivers that are more capable of color-matching, and network-accessible status information that warns users when toner is low or paper is jammed. And while both HP and Xerox have been embedding small Web servers into their network-attached printers for years, now the news is about e-mailing documents across the Internet directly to a printer.

Another interesting development this year in printer technology had to do with Dell and overall printer management and driver software. Two months ago, Dell shook the printing world by switching its private-labeled brand from HP to Lexmark, and the competition between those two companies increased as prices dropped on the newer and more capable monochrome and color lasers. Indeed, a very capable laser printer can be purchased for less than $1,000 (such as the HP LaserJet 2200), while a higher-end laser that will support all but the most demanding of workgroups can be bought for less than $2,000. The profit for printers is still in selling consumables, and that will continue well into 2003 unless Dell can force prices down in this area as well as in the overall printer marketplace. And improvements in printer-management software and other tools are making it easier for solution providers to deploy and maintain printers across the enterprise.

At Your Service

Web services also came into its own in 2002, representing another area that will see increasing prominence in the coming year. (Our story on new developments in Web services begins on page 87.) Application development tools/languages (e.g., HTML, XML), Internet/development tools (e.g., Web design, Web database), e-commerce applications and content-management are the leading types of Web-services software that surveyed solution providers say they'll be deploying in the next 12 months.

Web services has become the new way of developing applications, embracing both legacy data inside the corporate firewall and external users and partners on the outside. As Microsoft's .Net continues to receive a great deal of attention from consultants and partners, competitors such as BEA Systems, IBM and Oracle continue to make improvements to their own products to try to capture developers' mindshare. Web services has expanded to include integrated development environments, roll-your-own portals, integrated applications suites and content-management tools.

Adding more fuel to the competitive fires is the entire open-source movement, which presents additional challenges for the more knowledgeable VARs to figure out the right mix of tools, technologies and applications to deploy for particular applications.

In the storage universe, disk drives have become commoditized, and the cost-per-MB is at an all-time low. That's a good thing, because demand for storage continues to increase as enterprises deploy video, audio and imaging applications that can quickly eat up disk-drive space. No longer is a terabyte of data anything unusual or, for that matter, very costly.

Storage arrays are also getting cheaper and more capable, and specialized 1U-sized appliances have begun to proliferate for everything from e-mail, security, network monitoring, caching and load-balancing. The difficult part will be for the channel to keep up with all those new developments and understand how each of these appliance devices is most useful. Certainly, there will be many more of them in the coming months, given that more than half of our SOT respondents already are selling SANs and NAS devices and plan to deploy more in the coming year. (Our story on the latest developments in appliances begins on page 95.)

Platform Preferences

Finally, there are new processor platforms for the coming year. (Our story on the future of processor platforms begins on page 73.) Smaller devices that used to be called personal digital assistants have been transformed by tablet versions that are slightly bigger and somewhat lighter than the smallest laptops. Cell phones have been transformed into devices that run the Palm OS and do more than just make voice calls. And, continuing trends from previous years, more users are going mobile: More than two in five solution providers (41 percent) in our survey are likely deploying mobile technologies in their current customer solutions, according to our research. CPUs have gotten faster, but no one really seems to care, and the other elements of a computer,such as video processing and main memory,are getting all the attention and reaping performance gains. Our survey supports that as well: Intel's Xeon platform has accounted for less than 40 percent of overall 2002 sales, according to SOT respondents, and planned deployments will only increase by a few percentage points in 2003.

Given these different markets, the technology outlook for the coming year offers solution providers lots of promise and plenty of challenges. By no means has R and D come to a complete standstill and, indeed, new developments and products continue to be born in these seven areas,just at slower rates than we've seen before. Read on to learn more about the technologies that will see you through the next 12 months.