IT People, Places, Things to Hear More or Less About in '08

Looking ahead to 2008, here are three subjects we hope to hear more about and a few we hope to hear way less about.

More

-- Municipal Wi-Fi success stories. It seems the latest stories about municipal Wi-Fi projects are all negative; Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and Houston are among cities struggling to deliver citywide wireless Internet services amid political infighting. It's time for some success stories.

-- Mobile data security. About 60% of IT security practitioners lack the resources to implement proper policies and put controls on off-network devices, according to a recent survey by Ponemon Institute. Enterprises need to get better about protecting data on electronic devices that leave the network -- and fast.

-- Apple in the enterprise. Leopard, Apple's new operating system for servers and desktops, has been generating a lot of buzz. Now it's go time: Will enterprises adopt the 10.5 release of OSX?

Less

-- Things catching on fire. Flaming cell phones, combustible laptop batteries, and fiber installations gone wrong were everywhere in the news in 2007. Enough already.

-- Data breaches. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group, has kept a running tally of the number of records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches in the United States since January 2005. As of early December, a whopping 216 million records have been compromised.

-- The SCO Group. The company lost a key court ruling in its lawsuit against Novell, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and reported weak quarterly results within the last few months alone. Are we done yet?

-- Patent prospectors. Patent holding company NTP in September filed lawsuits against Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA for infringing on several of its patents related to the delivery of e-mail to mobile devices. NTP's similar 4-year-old patent suit against BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion in 2006 netted a settlement of $612.5 million -- so it seems unlikely this round of NTP suits will go away. Can't hurt to hope, though.

-- Corporate malfeasance. Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted of insider trading in April, and in July was ordered to pay $52 million and spend six years in prison. Ex-CA CEO Sanjay Kumar, meanwhile, in August reported to federal prison to begin serving his 12-year term for accounting fraud.

Kumar also was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in restitution to victims of securities fraud. Five years after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, let's hope the trail of technology vendor convicts is waning.