Predictions for 2011

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always slow. Salespeople closed their last minute deals of the year before the holidays. Executive teams and staffers take well-deserved winter respites. And the Channel-Lands fall as quiet as a New England hallow covered in blanket of solstice snow. OK, that’s a lame attempt at alliteration to say not much was happening this week. So, rather than recounting the top stories of the week, let’s take a gander at some of the obligatory lists of the top stories of 2010 and predictions for 2011.

Exciting Year Ahead in Networking

Our friends at CRN think 2011 will be another breakout year for networking. Some of the predictions are pretty obvious – there’s little doubt Cisco will make a bunch of acquisitions as it does each year and the HP-Cisco rivalry will continue unabated. However, some trends have been brewing for a while and will come to a boil in 2011, such as the convergence of the IT and telephony channels and rapid expansion of WAN optimization. The wild card: Dell entering the networking market.

Check out the CRN Networking Predictions.

Apple: The Next-Generation Hacker Target

Researchers at security powerhouse McAfee are predicting 2011 will be the year of Apple when it comes to security targets and exploits. In its 2011 Threats Prediction report, Apple is among the most prominent targets. As the report notes: “Historically, the Mac OS platform has remained relatively unscathed by malicious attackers, but McAfee Labs warns that Mac-targeted malware will continue to increase in sophistication in 2011. The popularity of iPads and iPhones in business environments, combined with the lack of user understanding of proper security for these devices, will increase the risk for data and identity exposure, and will make Apple botnets and Trojans a common occurrence.”

Security prognosticators (myself among them) have predicted Apple becoming a target for years. Those predictions often invited the scorn of Apple loyalists. But Apple has reported ordered 65 million iPads for distribution in 2011 and the market share of Mac PCs continues to climb into the double digits. This is definitely increasing Apple’s attack surface.

Unified Communications Comes of Age

Charlene O’Hanlon, a resident blogger at The VAR Guy, believes 2011 is the year unified communications and collaboration will come to fore. In her 2011 prediction piece, she writes of how vendors such as Polycom and Siemens Enterprise Communications are releasing platforms that have greater compatibility and interoperability than market-leading, legacy solutions. Greater interoperability, she correctly believes, will lead to greater collaboration among vendors to take on powerhouses Cisco and Avaya. The other big driver of UCC: mobility. Vendors – particularly Microsoft – are expanding their ability to support UCC on mobile devices. As users become more aware of the benefits that come with UCC, their demand for solutions will increase. 

Improbable (But Interesting) Predictions

We have Art Wittmann of InformationWeek for bringing a little levity to the slew of predictions flooding the media this week with his clever “Stuff that Probably Won’t Happen in 2011 (But Ya Never Know)” column. In it, Wittmann predicts Apple will buy electric sports car manufacturer Tesla and release the first “iCar”, AMD’s envy for everything Intel does will prompt it to buy Symantec, Facebook will buy LG and release the “FBfridge (a refrigerator that recommends food based on your friends preferences), and HP will shock the world and hire Martha Stewart to be its new CEO. Of all Wittmann’s predictions, I’m placing my money on HP hiring Martha – it wouldn’t be a bad decision compared to some of the gaffes it has made in the last year.

Well, that’s all the week’s news from Channel-Lands, where all the technology works, all the deals are profitable and all of the companies are above average. In fact, that’s it for Channel-Lands, as this is the last installment of this blog. It’s been a lot of fun recapping the trends happening in this little hamlet we call the channel. You can continue reading my musings at Channelnomics. Best of luck to everyone in 2011.