SAN JOSE – While unified communications and security may be two of the hottest topics when it comes to the overall networking industry, they’re not the only growth areas expected in 2008.

“The first one that we’re thinking a lot about these days … is the data center. The data center, the network as the platform in the data center is a very exciting concept for us,” said Andrew Sage, senior director of worldwide channels marketing at Cisco Systems.

Sage said he is expecting growth in the architecture that supports virtualization in the data center, as well as the ability to have intelligent networking in the data center so as to drive application performance.

Virtualization of storage and computing is going to drive the need for very smart, very high performance switching fabrics, Sage said.

“[There’s been] a lot of energy and effort the last couple of years to build data centers … and they’re realizing they have a lot of latency out in the field,” said John Dathan, director of enterprise sales in Canada for Juniper Networks.

With more applications, including virtualization, being run on networks and allowing people to connect to the corporate network and data center from anywhere, there’s a need for WAN optimization technology.

“It’s certainly growing very quickly and it’s past early adoption, but I wouldn’t call it mainstream yet,” Dathan said.

According to Darren Hamilton, partner business manager at HP Canada, mobility will continue to be a big area, specifically around wireless technologies. The time for early adoption of wireless is over, and as organizations understand more about the benefits of a wireless networking infrastructure, they’re adopting the technology and using it.

Wireless has gone from a “nice to have” to a “need to have” in the last year, Hamilton said.

“People have come to expect and trust that wireless is available to them,” he said.

One of the biggest areas will be in collaboration and video, Sage said.

“Really, at the end of the day, collaboration is fundamentally going to change how technology is used and how networks are built and how the users of those networks interact, and it’s uniquely at this point being driven from the consumer side of the economy,” Sage said.

While many technologies in the past were driven from the enterprises down to the consumer, collaboration is the other way around, he said.

Additionally, the concept of IP video and telepresence will continue to gain traction. Cisco launched its Cisco TelePresence product earlier this year, and other vendors have launched their IP video products as well. According to Sage, many businesses are using telepresence every day for meetings instead of having executives get on airplanes.

“That trend is just going to continue for us,” he said.

Video is still in its early development phase, though. While Cisco offers its high-end, high-definition TelePresence product, others are delivering video using Webcams and YouTube. The real opportunity may be somewhere in the middle.

“I think our opportunity is in the middle. In the middle, there’s a huge opportunity to take some of the learnings from the high-end in terms of quality and experience, and some of the learnings from the massively-scaled end in terms of ease-of-use and deployment, and bring them together in the middle that scales and has some of that simplicity and premium experience,” Sage said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnecIT

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