Eight hot technologies most likely to burn a hole in your pocket in the next year By Christopher Lindquist

As one year ends, a new one begins. And by the time you’ve finished singing "Auld Lang Syne," another dozen vendors will be lined up at your door, looking to lure your company onto the next technology wave. But budgets for new tools will be tighter than ever, so it will only pay to play with winners.

To that end, we’ve compiled a list of technologies we think have a shot at making it big in 2002. The current economic climate makes the crystal ball even cloudier than normal, of course, but these apps seem headed for the big time sooner rather than later.

Security

It’s an axiom of IT: Network and system security are never going to get less important. But increasingly frequent attacks by hackers, viruses and Trojans, combined with the world’s sharpened interest in safety and security, will make 2002 a banner year for security providers of all types. Sept. 11 gave companies an excuse to start talking more earnestly about security, says Chris Byrnes, vice president of security programs for Meta Group, an analyst company in Stamford, Conn. In some cases, he says, members of the board of directors are walking up to CIOs and asking for details of their security and recovery plans.

Fortunately for those CIOs, they’ll have plenty of options, including new intrusion detection and network scanning tools, security services, functional (if not yet manageable) biometric tools and more.

Electronic Collaboration

By the time you read this, hopefully the airline business will have picked up significantly since the Sept. 11 hijackings. But even the optimists aren’t predicting a return to the good old days of air travel. A shrinking economy coupled with decreased convenience and new trepidation will continue to hamper business travel for some time. As a result, videoconferencing and online collaboration are in line for serious boosts.

A study on Sept. 19 by the National Business Travel Association showed that 88 percent of companies planned to increase use of videoconferencing. Web collaboration services such as WebEx were already seeing their usage grow as the economy sank, and there’s no sign that trend will change anytime soon. Videoconferencing options that provide decent quality at low cost are expanding (see "Don’t Hang Up," Oct. 1, 2001). People still need to meet. But the handshake isn’t going to be as critical anymore.

Peer-to-Peer

This may be the biggest long shot on our list. Peer-to-peer tools (which directly connect client systems instead of relying on servers) were possibly the most overplayed new technology of the past couple years, with proponents claiming it would reshape not only computing but society (for example, that hue and cry of "information wants to be free" and "I don’t want to pay $15.95 for a CD anymore"). Now Napster has been whipped into submission by the courts, and several other consumer-oriented peer services have hit hard times. But the business side of the market may be just getting under way as IT managers find niches for tools that keep employees connected to each other no matter where they are.