IM, RFID Tags, Security Make Gartner's Hot Technology List

These were among the predictions the consulting firm made this week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in San Diego.

Gartner Research Director Carl Claunch said that by 2005 about half of all communications in corporations will be through realtime messaging. "The early signs are that people who adopt really like it," he said.

The technology still faces issues of privacy and security and lack of integration with business applications, but tools are being developed to address these issues, he said.

He said RFID tags, chips that transmit identification information,are beginning to replace bar codes in many applications. "We're seeing a swell of use because of the decline in price tags," Claunch said.

In the security area, firewalls, intrusion protection, ID management and other security functions will be integrated into a single platform by 2006, he predicted. He said antivirus and spam-control applications, however, would likely continue to be deployed as separate technologies.

Other technologies that should make headway in the coming months include location-based wireless services, grid computing, speech recognition for command and control of computer systems, IT telephony for small and midsize deployments, services-oriented applications architecture, tablet PCs and implementation of what the firm calls "realtime enterprise" IT strategies.

The realtime enterprise, which Claunch described as more of a business strategy than a technology, encompasses a range of technologies such as instant messaging, mobile computing, realtime analytics and portals that help businesses reduce business-process cycles.

Gartner, which was heavily promoting the term at the conference, predicted that 20 percent of the Global 2000 enterprises would cite realtime enterprise as a top spending priority by the end of this year. The firm based its prediction on a January survey of IT managers.

Gartner also forecast Wednesday that the number of wireless LAN users will grow from 4.2 million this year to more than 31 million by 2007. About half of the WLAN implementations over the next two years will take place in vertical markets, particularly in health care, education and warehousing/manufacturing.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said that as more and more applications require broadband connections, there could be more than 100,000 hot spots implemented over the next five years.

"However, due to the need to wait until a large enough population is equipped with WLAN capability, profitability for hot spot providers will be stalled for three to five years," he said.

Grid computing, while among Gartner's top 10 technologies, will likely remain confined to scientific and engineering applications through 2006, Claunch predicted. He said much of the hype surrounding grid computing was the result of marketing people attaching the term to various technologies that are not truly grid computing technologies. "We still don't have turnkey products," he said.