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IM drives enterprise data messaging needs

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CIOL Bureau
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According to a Zdnet report on top strategic technologies for 2005 as per Gartner predictcition is that by 2005, 60 percent of interpersonal data messaging by enterprise and consumers will be real-time, exploiting location and other presence indicators. Instant messaging has already inundated enterprises and a variety of handheld devices.

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However, it quotes Carl Claunch, a research vice president at Gartner, as saying, some of the inhibitors include security concerns, lack of an audit trail, quality of service limitations, integration issues and lack of support for non-text media.

"IM is not sufficiently secure because the underlying IM framework wasn't design for security," Claunch said,” he said.

However, several companies now offer instant message software that addresses security, auditing and integration issues. AOL, IBM, Microsoft, Sun and Yahoo have begun selling corporate IM services that include security and regulatory compliance features. IBM is experimenting with an application called NotesBuddy, which integrates IM functionality with e-mail. IM conversations are stored in e-mail in-boxes, and are searchable.

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Within its own user base, Gartner achieved positive results due to the internal use of instant messaging; e-mail went down by 40 percent and voice calls by 70 percent, Claunch said.

"Some IM provides security and auditing, but you still don't have the tools required to deal with identity, authentication and authorization when communicating with people outside of an enterprise," Claunch said.

Given the popularity of instant messaging, enterprises who want to keep employees happy and more productive will need to set policies for the use of instant messaging. In the future, Claunch said, IM will be more integrated into applications, rather than an island of online dialog that vapourises when the window is closed.

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Wider use of WLANs

With the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol gaining converts, the security concerns associated with wireless deployments are becoming less prevalent. According to Claunch, WPA will provide sufficient security to allow WLAN to be applied more generally as an alternative to wired connectivity. "People have been reticent and have considered it an unwarranted risk to deploy wireless LANs," Claunch said. But

"WPA meets a threshold for wireless security, making the idea of wired-only networks more ludicrous over time."

WPA is derived from and will be forward compatible with the upcoming IEEE 802.11i standard. The 802.11i standard (also called WPA2) will incorporate the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, which provides better encryption than previous Wi-Fi security. Products certified for WPA2 are expected later this year.

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P Telephony

IP telephony, including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol, is moving toward mainstream users, but not until 2006, according to Gartner analysts. "By 2006, most enterprises will have sufficiently implemented an IP telephony infrastructure to start deriving dramatic new business value from their applications," Claunch said. The applications include IP-based conferencing, call centers, and integrated collaboration suites.

Cost savings is an important component of in adopting IP telephony systems, and most enterprises are waiting for replacement cycles to remove older digital and analog phone systems.

Utility computing

Related to real-time infrastructure and sharing IT resources is utility computing. According to Claunch, utility computing is a model for delivering IT services that shifts risk from local IT to the vendor. "It's a more flexible and predictable model. Instead of choosing, owning and operating IT equipment, customers can buy the results of a system from a utility computing provider," Claunch said.

Typically, the pricing model is based on usage, a pay-as-you-go licensing model that allows enterprises to meet peak usage needs without huge capital investments. Various hosting services today offer some form of utility computing pricing, with access provided through browsers, Web services, proprietary interfaces or client code, Claunch noted. Gartner predicts that 30 percent of enterprises will adopt the utility computing model by 2007, up from 15 percent today.

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Grid

Grid computing goes several steps beyond real-time infrastructure and utility computing. It's a concept, and term, that major vendors and startups have adopted as a key future initiative. Claunch cautions that grid computing as marketed by some companies may be more hype than reality.

Grid computing has grown out of scientific and technical computing applications, which require massive amounts of horsepower to solve problems, such as life sciences research and weather simulations. A grid environment breaks applications in multiple parts that can be run on separate computers, rather than a single cluster, in parallel. Businesses are now looking to apply grid computing for commercial applications and utility computing.

Gartner predicts that grid computing use within commercial enterprises will mostly be used for computationally intensive workloads, such as complex business and financial analytics, through 2006, however. The research firm doesn't expect utility computing services to use grids until 2008. The standards for grid computing are still evolving and customising applications for parallelism will take time to evolve, according to Claunch.

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RFID tags

According to Gartner, radio frequency identification (RFID) and similar wireless chips will evolve from a supply-chain technology into enablers of value-added consumer applications, such as item location and status reporting by 2012. The expectation is that the costs for RFID tags will decline to the point that it's a no-brainer to deploy the technology.

The use of RFID will allow life-of-the-product tracking, more in depth data histories and more market efficiencies. Sensors could be embedded in perishable product shipments, monitoring temperature, vibration, spoilage and other factors as the goods move from transport to warehouse to store shelves.

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