Stories by: Neal Weinberg

If your IT department has decided to "go green," you probably need help from your strategic IT vendors. But which ones?

In tough economic times, all enterprise departments are required to tighten their belts. To help IT execs navigate through the cost-cutting maze, Gartner analysts Wednesday presented a list of 20 ways that IT execs can slash expenses.

You can call it cloud computing. You can call it grid computing. You can call it on-demand computing. Just don't call it the next big thing -- at least not yet.

There is no topic hotter than global warming. After all, Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising awareness, his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar, and terms like "carbon footprint" are now part of the common lexicon.

We've known for a long time that requiring just a user name and password to get on the network or to access personal information on a Web site isn't the tightest security posture, but there weren't a lot of good alternatives, and there wasn't that much pressure to change.

ISCSI runs over plain, old Ethernet, which means you don't need a separate Fibre Channel network. You don't need host bus adapters. You don't need Fibre Channel switches. You don't need specialized IT staffers.

IT execs want to make sure that users don't come back from a business trip and infect the entire company. IT execs want to make sure contractors with visitor access to the network aren't able to do damage or get access to confidential information. And IT execs want to make sure that users are properly authenticated and that they only access applications they need to do their jobs.

Some day the IEEE will get around to finalizing the 802.11n standard that it began working on in 2003. That some day was supposed to be 2006. Then 2007. Then 2008. Maybe, the standard will be finalized in 2009. Maybe 2010.

When it comes to hot buzzwords, nothing comes close to Web 2.0. Nobody knows exactly what it means but everybody uses it. In fact, at Network World we've started getting press releases referring to Web 3.0.....whatever that is.

VMware, which created x86 server virtualization and is the dominant player in the market, is absolutely on fire. When EMC bought the company in 2003, VMware revenues were around US$100 million a year. VMware's final numbers for 2007 aren't out yet, but the company is on pace to hit US$1.5 billion.

How hot is the data leakage prevention market? Well, if the big boys like Cisco, Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro are snapping up DLP start-ups to the tune of US$1.6 billion in 2007, there must be a reason.