Daniel Robinson

Now that the holiday season is over and the memory of those New Year hangovers is starting to fade, firms will be taking stock of the past year and anticipating what 2004 is likely to bring. For the IT industry, an improvement from the lean times of the past few years is eagerly expected.

It's a little premature to start celebrating an end to the downturn just yet, but some analysts are confidently predicting a year of healthier IT budgets for 2004. One of the reasons for this optimism is that it is almost five years since technical issues concerning the year 2000 date change prompted many companies to upgrade their systems en masse. Any Windows desktops bought back then should be ripe for replacement by now, the reasoning goes.

And right on cue, desktop sales appear to be rising. However, this seems to have been led by consumers rushing to buy new PCs before Christmas rather than a spike in corporate purchases. For IT departments, the choices are tougher than for home users looking for a better gaming experience.

Until recently, it could be taken as read that firms would replace their Intel-based desktops running Windows with newer Intel-based desktops running Windows. Then things started to get complicated, with laptops growing in popularity, desktop Linux distributions improving in terms of ease of use and application support, and alternative strategies such as server-based computing offering reduced management overheads.

Any firms looking to replace their desktop systems this year will need to take great care when weighing the alternatives. For example, a growing mobile strategy may mean that workers will be better served by a laptop - or would a desktop system complemented by a palmtop or smartphone fit the bill?

The easy option will still be to order another fleet of PCs running Windows XP, but a number of recent security problems have taken some of the shine off Microsoft's flagship product as far as many enterprise customers are concerned.

With the launch of Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) late last year, firms gained a serious alternative to Microsoft's products. JDS combines the Linux operating system with Sun's own StarOffice productivity suite. This package would allow firms to cut software licensing costs, but would be a dramatic change for companies that have grown with Windows and Office. Sun has already attracted some custom in the public sector with JDS, but it will be interesting to see how many businesses are willing to adopt it.

Server-based computing has also been gaining favour, as companies have come to question the need to keep buying ever-faster desktops when most staff are still using productivity tools that have changed little over the past five years. These applications could easily be hosted centrally, and the desktop client reduced to a more easily managed terminal.

Most companies will probably be using a mixture of most or all of these approaches already. But while 2004 might start off with the majority of firms relying on desktop PCs to meet most of their business client needs, will this still be true by the end of the year? This could be an interesting 12 months.

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