"WAN optimization (accelerating application delivery over WANs and UTM requirements" was pegged by Linda Hui, managing director of F5 Networks Hong Kong as overrated. "There were many acquisitions in 2005 as various vendors tried to pursue this market." Hui said a survey conducted by her firm in mid-2006 showed many corporations are quite happy with their branch-to-branch network performance. "When these corporations encountered network-performance issues, they simply chose to add bandwidth rather than adding a WAN optimization device," she said. "Customers explained this is due to continuous falling bandwidth cost {which provided] easier justification for adding bandwidth rather than purchasing a device with which they have no experience." Hui said she believes there's "still a lot of market education required to help organizations understand that latency issues are not resolved by adding bandwidth."

Top IT trend for 2007?

According to Sin Chung Kai, Legislative Councillor for IT, broadband wireless access (BWA) and next generation networks will be a major trend in '007. "Mobility has become one of the most important elements for any kind of IT application or device," said Sin. "With the vision of moving towards a ubiquitous information society, where people can access any information anytime anywhere, we need to ensure that we have advanced information infrastructure serving as our foundation."

"For the trade and logistics industry, we expect DTTNs (Digital Trade and Transportation Networks) to be one of the focal trends next year," said Yue. "DTTNs will accelerate a higher adoption rate of electronic commerce for SMEs as it reduces the entry barrier for SMEs to communicate with big players electronically. We expect that more application service providers and software developers will leverage the DTTN platform for application development, so more businesses will realize the benefit of electronic commerce."

"Click fraud," said CNN's Stout, "especially as it starts to erode Google's share price."