Instead of a crystal ball, Nucleus Research, a Wellesley, Mass.-based provider of research and advisory services, used its ongoing analysis of end-user clients and in-house vendor research to predict IT trends for 2005.
The results:
- Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance regulations will drive investment in content and records management.
- RFID hangovers - Companies will still need some time to get RFID tags right in order to provide reliable information.
- Maintenance fees will become the next battlefield. Customers are tired of paying for upgrades they may never need and licenses they rarely use, and will now get tougher on negotiating fees.
- Spam explodes. Until Microsoft gets better at keeping it out, those clever spammers will keep sending it out. Organizations will continue to receive spam in spite of their existing spam filtering software until vendors catch up to spammers' intelligence.
