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January 4, 1999

Predictions
Products With Promise

The year 2000 deadline and the maturity of many new technologies will make the new year a pivotal one

By Sean Gallagher, Jason Levitt, Jeff Angus, and Logan Harbaugh of InformationWeek Labs

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lmost everyone in the IT industry is living in the future. Vendors live on the promise of their next product. IT workers spend their time trying to future-proof their systems. And everyone is especially focused on a point in time 12 months in the future.

It doesn't take H.G. Wells to get a handle on where things are headed in 1999--after all, since InformationWeek Labs operates in the world of beta software, we're already living 15 minutes into the future.

The coming year promises to be a pivotal one, not just because companies face the ultimate project deadline--the year 2000--but because so many new technologies will reach something resembling maturity in the course of it. Microsoft's next-generation operating system and enterprise architecture are set to arrive, but it appears that Microsoft's hegemony is less than certain. The Internet will continue to change not just how we use IT, but the very core of IT vendors' business models. Hang on--it's going to be a bumpy ride.

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Here, then, are the predictions of the InformationWeek Labs staff.

E-Commerce
Electronic commerce was the hot topic in 1998 and it will continue to be one of the big growth areas in 1999, especially in conjunction with electronic data interchange. The stakes are high in the multibillion-dollar move to electronic, standards-based EDI. Business-to-business transactions, still largely mired in massive legacy infrastructure, are slowly moving to standards-based Web systems. Forthcoming Extensible Markup Language standards should accelerate the move to TCP/IP and the Web.

Look for a better picture of the E-business model to emerge as it becomes clear how technology can tie together the disparate elements of EDI systems (banking, sell-side, buy-side, transaction logic) and integrate them into other aspects of corporate infrastructure.

Open Source
As 1999 rolls around, it's still not obvious that Netscape's source code strategy for Communicator 5.0 has gained the company anything except the nodding approval of freedom-loving hackers on the Net. Our guess is that, even though it's not a pure open-source approach--Netscape has its own licensing model for the source code--it will reap rewards from letting the Net innovate with its source. That, in turn, may galvanize other companies to follow suit. Businesses and developers have never been this high on the prospect of open source in the enterprise and it's definitely on an upward curve as we head into 1999.

More than a few companies have confessed to using Linux as one of their strategic server platforms, and Apache still rules as the Web server of choice for scalable, high-performance installations.

Outsourcing Nets
Outsourcing has been a great way for IT departments to cut costs, but 1999 may be the year when outsourcing redefines IT. It's easy enough to farm out pieces of the enterprise, but why not just outsource the enterprise? Mount all of IT's software remotely from server farms run by a third party so the IT department can concentrate on making employees more productive instead of upgrading software and putting out fires.

The mythical big, inexpensive Internet pipe will make this a reality, but it will require better xDSL coverage than is currently available, as well as business-class service with cable modems. Big, cheap pipes will make outsourcing the enterprise cost-effective for many businesses. It may not happen in a big way in 1999, but the seeds will be planted.

Collaboration
A lot of what happens in collaborative computing in the next year will hinge on the global economy. If developing countries continue to have economic problems, extranet applications will proliferate rapidly. If those economies pick up, extranet deployment will suffer compared with traditional groupware applications. This will happen because as global companies try to use technology to penetrate untapped markets, they'll find extending existing groupware to new offices cheaper than inventing complex new models. This will involve more project-management and project-accounting software, such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise platforms with add-ons.

But with Microsoft's rollout of Office 2000, the office suite designed with Web-based collaboration, a lot of shops without existing collaboration environments will have reason to examine them. Office 2000 will push owners of previous versions of Office toward more collaborative apps.

Knowledge
Knowledge management should advance this year, but that doesn't mean useful applications will become more common. The limiting factor on knowledge-management practices is corporate culture. If most American businesses insist on sacrificing commitment to their employees in exchange for revenue up-ticks, they won't be able to become the kind of rapidly adaptive knowledge-management organizations that have a chance to become the big winners in the next millennium.

The next year will see some interesting product advances, though the most promising ones are not integrated solutions. Beehive, from Abuzz, is a clever tactical product that distributes the task of delivering institutional knowledge to many people. Two players in the search-and-retrieval area offer interesting knowledge-management technologies. Verano's Illuminar uses the most advanced context-management application we've seen, and Excalibur is rolling out an engine that will identify video images.

Networking
The new year will bring about a gradual consolidation of network products and vendors. Standards will continue to evolve, precipitated by the Internet.

The standards race between Novell Directory Services and Microsoft's Active Directory will heat up. Cisco plans to adopt Active Directory to manage its routers, while Tivoli is integrating NDS with its TME 10 management platform. NDS is mature, but Active Directory enjoys Microsoft's marketing muscle.

In high-speed networking, standards will continue to evolve, providing advanced features such as quality of service and failover links that can work between different vendors' equipment. These advanced features will trickle down to lower-end products, eventually providing methods for prioritizing bandwidth even on inexpensive Ethernet switches.

The process of connecting to the Internet will also be streamlined. Many vendors are unveiling network-access products that can be preconfigured by an Internet service pro- vider and shipped to a customer, allowing plug-and-play func- tionality for the previously complex devices.

As more customers access the Internet at higher speeds, ISPs will be forced to implement more and faster technologies to stay competitive. There will be consolidation as smaller companies become unable to continue upgrading technology. We expect new billing practices as telcos shift models in an effort to recover lost revenue from Internet phone and fax services.

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