The IT World Canada editorial team sat down recently to make its fearless predictions for 2009, from market trends and hot technologies to potential mergers and acquisitions. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Briony Smith: One of my predictions for 2009 is that IT managers are going to get roped into managing mobile devices and iPhones in the enterprise. Every time we speak to analysts they drum it into us that IT managers need to set up best practices for security, but I don’t really get the impression that people are really aggressively doing that.
Devices just keep getting added on, and soon they’ll have mobile sprawl and this horrific network of barely connected, shoddily jotted things. And there will be all these 60-year-old tech-clueless businessmen and businesswomen saying “I want an iPhone too, my grandkid says it’s really cool,” and they’ll go home and and send important business documents over WiFi networks.
Dave Webb: About five years ago I was at one of Jim Balsille’s presentations, and I was talking to a Research in Motion representative who said you’ll never see a camera in a BlackBerry device. You know why that is? It is because it’s not a consumer device. And I don’t know if even going down a consumer road was a bright thing for BlackBerry in the first place. But to your point, consumer devices are inherently insecure; just the fact that you’re walking around with a phone with a camera in it.
Jeff Jedras: Well, that was one of the reasons why they didn’t have a camera before. They sold so many BlackBerries to the federal government and you can’t have a device with a camera inside a federal government building for security purposes. So I assume that they still do have models without the camera, because otherwise they’re shutting off that market, which is a market they dominate.
Smith: And just the amount of people who lose cell phones, who lose laptops.
Greg Meckbach: We’re talking about the iPhones and the BlackBerries. I think with the iPhone one of the biggest issues was the data rates and I think that’s going to be a big issue for IT managers when they all of a sudden get these horrendous bills for data.
With the wireless spectrum auction, which was one of the big networking stories of 2008, I think some users are hoping that there will be downward pressure on data rates in 2009. I think one of the biggest stories of 2009 is that you won’t see downward pressure on data rates because a lot of the new entrants into the wireless market are not going to have their networks even set up throughout most of 2009 because of the recession.
They’re not going to be able to raise debt financing to actually build their networks. And even though they’ve got the spectrum, they spent the money on the spectrum. They still have to set up all their stores, and all their marketing staff.
Kathleen Lau: In the area of business intelligence, I think we’re going to see BI move from the mid to high level executives to the frontline knowledge workers. I was speaking to an analyst who said that we’re going to see more intelligent tools, more self service BI, so people like me can just go on this tool and print out reports and I don’t need IT to put their hands in there. It’s going to be really completely easy.
Shane Schick: A lot of Web 2.0 companies are going to go out of business in 2009, and if the Liberals and the government manage to somehow sort themselves out in the next while, there’s going to be another digital copyright piece of legislation that comes to the table that no one is going to be satisfied with.
Jedras: At CDN we’re going to see a lot of consolidation in the channel. Companies such as Softchoice and Compugen will be buying-out a lot of the smaller VARs and integrators that will be having trouble making money in this market.
As far as a hard prediction, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Microsoft will attempt to purchase our good Canadian company, Research in Motion. But they’ll fail because the thought of replacing the BlackBerry OS with Windows Mobile will just piss everyone off.
Schick: Or just turn the BlackBerry into a Zune. (Laughter.)
Webb: I think virtualization becomes actually really mature next year. I think the three majors in virtualization are going to survive the year, but maybe not all of 2010.
Smith: By that, do you mean Citrix? (Laughter.) But who will buy them?
Webb: I predicted last year that someone would buy Citrix and it didn’t happen.
Jedras: I used to say every year that Cognos will be bought, and it took maybe three years, but it finally happened.
Webb: So, if I say this often enough, someone will buy Citrix.
Schick: Maybe Sun will. That could be really interesting.
Webb: Third party management tools are almost necessary, so hypervisor almost becomes irrelevant with the proper management tools. Maybe that’s my prediction, that the hypervisor becomes irrelevant. It becomes commoditized.
Meckbach: I think companies will spend more on security. Even with the recession they still have to spend more on IT security if they’re going to be connected to a network in any way. I think the server market is just going to dry up because of virtualization and server consolidation. I think Nortel is going to get downsized to a point where it’s back to its original roots in supplying telecommunications equipment, and Cisco is going to continue to dominate the enterprise switch and router market. They’ll have control over pricing, despite the fact that you’ve got competitors like Juniper, F5 Networks and others that make equipment that is probably just as good as Cisco’s.
Rafael Ruffolo: And Mitel Networks goes back to selling lawn mowers.
Jedras: They’ve been doing some very interesting stuff with video.
Ruffolo: I’ve been to three or four conferences now where the CEOs have come out in the Second Life virtual worldand it’s just been the stupidest thing ever. I think in 2009 it will die. I think in 2009 all of these big CEOs, like John Chambers from Cisco and John Swainson from CA (see the Swainson Second Life video), will come to their senses and stop.
Schick: They’ll start to Twitter now.
Ruffolo: Maybe, but as long as they stop flying around in the virtual worlds. It’s just so stupid, that’s the only word to say it, and I don’t really see any of the business value in that and I doubt that they see it either. They should just drop it.
