Analysts reported, the week of Oct. 20, that:
-- the number of Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide will reach 45,000 by the end of this year of which half will be in Asia, with South Korea being the leading Wi-Fi market. The figure has doubled since the end of 2002, and the market is on track to reach 100,000 hotspots by early 2005, Pyramid Research said.
-- worldwide end-user VPN (virtual private network) product and service expenditures will grow 42 percent between 2003 and 2007, from US$25.3 billion to $35.8 billion, according to Infonetics Research. Worldwide end-user security service expenditures will grow 88 percent during the same period, from $5.2 billion to $9.8 billion.
-- IT spending will rebound in 2004 and continue to grow in the following two years, according to Gartner Inc., as IT managers focus on creating value through four key technologies: secure broadband wireless, mobile devices with very low power-consumption requirements, very reliable and very cheap computing power provided by real-time enterprise infrastructure, and a transition to service-oriented IT architectures.
-- multimedia messaging service (MMS) will be a US$22 billion [b] market worldwide by 2008 with 380 million [m] users, according to Strategy Analytics Ltd. The company advised operators to optimize their MMS platforms for the content industry, as large media brands seek to distribute video, photo and animated content.
-- corporations are becoming more interested in deploying instant messaging (IM), Sage Research Inc. said, with IM session logging and auditing, security, and connections to outside IM services being regarded as the most important features of an Enterprise Instant Messaging system.
-- just over half of all U.S. companies will have business intelligence (BI) software in use within 12 months, IDC said. Among large enterprises, nearly two-thirds of the companies surveyed have BI software in place or have plans to install it in order to leverage the large amount of information they are gathering through enterprise applications such as ERM, CRM and data warehousing