Although Windows Vista was a no-show until late in the year, there were plenty of compelling technological advances, the impact of which will reverberate in 2007.
Consider the world of network access. Even as the security industry readied new products for accommodating and protecting an increasingly mobile and wirelessly connected workforce, networking product companies pushed the envelope in convergence with new high-definition videoconferencing applications that combine voice, video and data over an IP network.
While there hasn't been an industry-wide client-side hardware migration since the turn of the century, 2006 was the year dual-core processing broke through on the server side. With power management concerns becoming more urgent, both large OEMs and custom-system builders reported a healthy uptick in replacement business.
Storage solution providers greeted the possibilities promised by advances in holography, which saves data as a 3-D representation rather than the zeroes and ones used by current storage technology—promising to protect data for a longer time on fewer discs.
These and other breakthroughs promise to shake up the status quo in 2007 and provide VARs and integrators with the raw materials to construct whole new lines of business.
