My work at Forrester is focused on helping strategists at IT suppliers (vendors) align their development, positioning, and messaging with the big trends and disruptions in the industry. Mobility, cloud computing, globalization … trends at that high altitude. Over the last 3 years or so, that has included sustainability as it has appeared on and risen higher on the strategy agenda of companies around the world.

 When I meet with strategists at tech suppliers large and small, we talk sustainability both in terms of how the companies are cleaning up their own practices and processes, and what they are doing to help their customers do the same. SAP’s “exemplar and enabler” language captures these parallel efforts nicely. But it’s still a limited perspective, one that I characterize as the IT industry playing defense. “We are improving our energy efficiency!” says the collective industry voice, as if trying to deflect public criticism of energy-hog data centers, or mountains of e-waste, or PCs left running 7 x 24. And yes, absolutely, the IT industry and its customers have more work to do to make IT infrastructure and processes less wasteful and more responsible.

Having temporarily relocated to Eastern France – far from Paris and closer to Switzerland and Italy – I recently had the pleasure of experiencing my closest Cisco TelePresence site in Rolle, Switzerland, on the north shore of Lake Geneva for a discussion with Paul Mountford, President of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Theatre.  Cisco’s Emerging Market’s strategy has focused on what they call “country transformation,” which revolves primarily around increasing the penetration of broadband.  For FY11, Cisco will shift the message from country-wide transformation to something that rings closer to home (literally and figurative) with talk of “life-changing” stories through “life-changing” networks.  While still a little lofty, the message resonates deeper than country transformation, which speaks primarily, if not exclusively, to high-level government officials.  More a topic for Davos than for a boardroom or a living room.

The life-changes that Cisco strives to enable still require broadband networks.  And, those networks are only as compelling as the services and content that pass over them – video, unified collaboration, cloud computing.  But those services are only possible with broadband to begin with – creating a chicken and egg phenomenon that needs to be broken in many countries, particularly those non-competitive telecom sectors where the incumbent provider faces little pressure to innovate.  For example, Costa Rican telecom operators still enjoy monopoly status, and restrictions around convergence in South Africa limit the playing field for DSL and other broadband services. However, there is hope. 

During the past few months, telecom service providers including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have highlighted their roadmaps and deployment plans for 4G network technologies. These 4G technologies include Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax networks. Enterprises in North America and Europe are in the early stages of 4G network adoption based on results from Forrester’s SMB and Enterprise Networks and Telecommunication survey. Approximately 4% of surveyed enterprises currently implement or are expanding their implementation of fixed or mobile WiMax networks, and 3% of firms are implementing or expanding their implementation of LTE networks. These implementation percentages are expected to increase as the service providers pursue their 4G deployment initiatives.  

Intel and McAfee, the odd couple of technology? At first blush, Intel is not a "best fit" acquirer like HP or IBM which have major software businesses, existing security solutions, and related capabilities such as systems management. And, Intel is not a services company either. So it's straightforward to spot the potential problems that need to be addressed.

But a longer-term perspective indicates that these two companies are on to something fundamental and could create a force to be reckoned with within the tech industry. We believe embedded, or integrated, security is the future. The acquisition is ahead of the market and will thus accelerate this evolution. Standalone security products, and the companies that create them, are on borrowed time. We will see security embedded into hardware, in mobile devices, M2M devices, smart computing devices (e.g., smart grid meters), laptops, and just about everything else. Embedding security at the chip level is not a new concept either. Companies like Renesas and ARM already do this. Cisco has also been embedding security into the network, while Microsoft has embedded it into the platform. In systems, we see embedded security in Internet service provider (ISP) devices most prevalently today.