Cisco’s acquisition of videoconferencing vendor Tandberg is interesting in itself - but the move didn’t occur in a vacuum. Andrew Collins talks to the pundits about what the acquisition means for the industry, and what else the future holds.

Cloud computing, virtualisation, unified communications and smarter ways of conserving energy in data centres were the main issues for our crystal ball gazers for 2009. Security, as usual, is still a focus and it seems it always will be with the cyber criminals always being one step ahead of the security industry. These issues will still be important for 2010 according to our pundits but we can add the National Broadband Network, the continuing explosion of data and what that means to storage, mobile broadband, 4G, desktop virtualisation and machine-to-machine technology.

Disk drives will soon reach 10 terabytes, but the storage industry is worrying about how these new drives will complicate storage, rather than rejoicing in extra capacity. Simon Sharwood explains the new technologies pushing disk capacity higher and explores why larger disks are not entirely good news.

Microsoft is in the running to win the best of the best employer award run by Hewitt Associates. The winner will be announced in March 2010. [ + ]

Once-doubtful users can easily be swayed to virtual desktop infrastructure's (VDI) myriad benefits, if the technology is presented to them the right way. The aim is to make VDI as good for users as physical desktops or even better.

It's business as usual for 3Com despite Hewlett-Packard's projected acquistion of the company which should come to fruition in 2010. 3Com has just appointed a new Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand. [ + ]

NICTA's Australian Technology Park Laboratory and corporate head office has opened. It will cater for 134 researchers, corporate staff and 63 PhD students to support collaboration. [ + ]

Until now, Australian organisations haven’t had many offerings to pick from when it came to hosted unified communications. But as Andrew Collins found out, the Australian UC market is about to be inundated with cloud-based services.

While CIOs continue to focus on maximising the value of their data centre investments, we’ll see vendors develop technologies like virtualisation and automation that will help to drive down costs and improve quality of service as they mature and gain traction. HP’s Mark Nielsen outlines how customers will benefit from increasing flexibility of choice for their infrastructure, either by building it themselves, outsourcing it or tapping into cloud-related services.

Paying someone to do grunt work is one of the more satisfying aspects of running a business. And for some small and medium businesses, outsourcing is the best way to deal with managing a UC deployment, reports Andrew Collins.

Cloud computing is fast becoming one of the most widely adopted IT trends of recent years. Lured by the offer of flexible, low-cost and easily scalable IT, many businesses are relying more and more heavily on cloud-based applications, storage and security. However, as highlighted by Gartner and many others, big questions remain over the security of cloud computing. Clearswift’s Peter Croft* explains how the big security questions should be answered.

Business process management (BPM) was unheard of just a few years ago, but the concept has now taken centre stage to become one of today’s most discussed business and technology management trends. Software AG’s Stephen Keys outlines the genesis of BPM and how it has evolved.

Enterprises and equipment vendors are learning the value of a complete readiness assessment before deploying voice over internet protocol (VoIP) across an organisation. The assessments are a critical step to a successful VoIP deployment, but many enterprises do not perform an assessment because of cost or because, after performing a baseline on network utilisation, they assume that their network has enough bandwidth to accommodate the voice traffic. Fluke Networks’ Wayne Allen* reports on the importance of assessment and the consequences of not assessing the network correctly.

While the demand for storage virtualisation has opened up sales opportunities for vendors, it has also created numerous myths about it. Hitachi’s Simon Elisha sets out to quash these myths in order to distinguish the facts from the hype.

With the world running out of energy and the concomitant need to conserve energy, measuring the amount of energy used in data centres and the whole enterprise is critical. Merri Mack looks at proposed ways energy is to be measured and some of the small steps being made to implement a standard metric.