Technology

Findings From the Gartner 2006 Global Research Meeting: Rapid Innovation Is Key to Success for Next-Generation Telecom Vendors
The telecoms market is changing rapidly, and new competitors and shorter product life cycles are just two of the challenges facing the industry. The ability to innovate quickly will be crucial to the success of vendors.
Low-Trust World Suits Identity Federation Providers
Complexity in establishing trust among relying parties forces a community-of-interest approach to identity federation. Vendors stand to gain business in this low-trust environment.
IPTV Is a Platform, Not a Product
Most telcos are looking at television via Internet Protocol as a product. But if they want to see long-term benefits, they need to look at it as a platform that allows them to offer a constantly evolving set of products.
Consumer Lifestyles Determine Features in Mobile Business Handsets
Business use of mobile devices is directly correlated to the environment in which an individual lives and is not driven by availability of mobile office applications. Vendors must consider this when designing mobile devices.
Implications From the Ever-Rising Tide of Consumerization
Consumerization, defined as the adoption of consumer-oriented/designed IT that is used inside the business environment, will bring IT support and security nightmares for companies. Ready or not, enterprises will increasingly be required to support consumer technology adoption.
Virtual Machine Software Licensing Could Cost You More
The creation of software licensing models to accommodate the implementation of VM technology lags behind the technology itself. Initially, expect to pay higher software licensing costs as some vendors exploit this mismatch. In the long term, the technology will drive more-equitable licensing models.
New Controls on Printing Will Be Implemented
Organizations will go beyond today's broad cost controls on office printing to impose new layers of control over what documents are printed and by whom. Organizations and countries will vary in how they implement these controls.
Web 2.0 Is Not the Last Stage of the Internet Revolution
Current excitement about a second wave of Web capabilities is a major development, but there will be another wave starting early next decade.
Security Infrastructure Prerequisites for a High-Trust Environment
Security infrastructure conditions and capabilities are the prerequisites for unfettered interaction between businesses and consumers. Changes in these conditions and capabilities can lead to a more-restrictive business environment.
Virtual Branch Offices Require a New Architectural Approach to Servers and Networking
The very nature of the branch office is changing. As small office/home office and mobile workers and distributed business processes become the norm, traditional box-centric branch-office network and computing architectures will rapidly become less relevant.


What is Findings

Gartner analysts engage in many internal research discussions. To share some of that thinking more rapidly with clients we are now publishing Findings from many of these discussions – brief summarizations of conclusions, reflecting developing research positions.

This set of Findings is a result of an annual gathering of Gartner’s global analyst community, where views of the future of IT are discussed. They cover a wide range of topics that affect our clients, the industry and business. These Findings are signposts and indicators of the future. Many are surprising. Although not all of them present definitive conclusions, you can expect to see topics discussed in Findings developed further in our research during the year. To assist you in locating items of interest, we have categorized Findings into software applications, technology, management and industry–specific topics.