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Security
Converged Voice, Video
Special Report: That Was
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The problem is compounded by the fact that the sheer volume of data within the organization is increasing. Through 2007, the number of enterprise e-mail messages will increase by 40 percent per year, according to a Gartner report on RTEs. The amount of data stored magnetically each year increased by 80 percent from 1999 to 2002, according to a recent study by the University of California-Berkeley (see "Data Overload: Keep It Simple").
Although a few companies, including ArkiData Corp. and Trillium Software, are beginning to provide the tools to resolve data-integrity issues, this is, for the most part, a nut that will have to be cracked by IT without the assistance of third-party software. Data integrity is difficult to maintain, but a good database administrator and better up-front data scrubbing in custom applications can alleviate many problems (for a look at how MasterCard stays on top of its data, see "Warehouse Data Earns Its Keep").
Once you can trust your data, technologies that will bite off a big chunk of your budget next year will be heavily focused on the business and its processes, and will increasingly introduce Web services (SOAP) into your application infrastructure. The next generation of portals, CRM applications and EAI will continue to increase the use of SOAP within the enterprise throughout 2004. SOA will be the "killer architecture" that drives innovation for the next several years in the application space. The anticipated release of Excel 2003, with support for Web services as a data source, will drive organizations to upgrade existing packaged applications and devote resources to implementing SOAP interfaces in custom applications, to take advantage of this new visibility into the data the business relies on.
Also enabling the RTE are instant-messaging solutions and the next generation of portals, driven by emerging "portlet" technologies, such as WSRP (Web Services Remote Portlets) and JSR168 (Java Portlet API specification). A key component for success of initiatives in the real-time communication arena will be federated identity management. Information management solutions will be realized via the Liberty Alliance or a Microsoft-based initiative, but we expect a Liberty Alliance implementation in the short term: Products exist that support the Liberty Alliance, and Microsoft has wavered on the scope and responsibilities with its Passport road map.
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