Computing's crystal ball.

Sales of ERP are falling because most organisations bought packages to ensure they were year 2000-compliant. The only way out is to move into new areas, such as customer relationship management (CRM) - a policy started in 1999.

Expect ERP vendors' expansion into new customer sites - particularly via application service providers (ASPs) - and industry consolidation on the back of poor financial results from a string of vendors.

Systems management
Customers want to ensure bullet-proof ecommerce systems, and that's what product releases have concentrated on. The trend of focusing on ecommerce will continue.

The next version of Unicenter (promised for end of 1999) will launch at CA world in April 2000. Rivals Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard (HP) keep their plans under wraps.

HP does not sell a monolithic suite of system management tools, it ships a range of separate products with upgrades.

Careers
Will the market speed up again or die in the wake of fixing the millennium bug?

Evidence suggests the former, with any skill vaguely connected to ecommerce (webmaster, Java, Oracle db, C++) hot and getting hotter. Contractors are going through a slow patch, but people leaving the country or going permanent will cut down the supply side surplus.

Next-generation networks
Government will auction licences for the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), the third generation mobile phone networks, in spring.

Competition will be intense.

Mobile operators will launch high-speed services, such as general packet radio service (GPRS) and high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD), filling the gap before UMTS services come online.

Further consolidation of fixed and mobile operators is certain.

Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL)
BT will complete the upgrade of exchanges to ADSL technology by March, covering 70% of the population. BT's wholesale ADSL prices announced this month were favourably low, and should stimulate customer adoption.

Business-to-business ecommerce
Vendors will jump on this next year - look out for eprocurement, trading hubs or communities, and innovative mutations of business models such as auctioning.

Enterprise-level development tools, such as Enterprise Java Bean application servers and middleware, will grow in importance.

At a data exchange level, eXtensible markup language (XML) will grow in prominence.

Watch for a growing battle between the standards for XML data definitions, set by the Oasis industry consortium, and Microsoft's competing

Biztalk definitions. HP, who entered the Internet software ring in 1999 with e-speak, will keep a low profile.

The big winners will be middleware vendors, such as BEA Systems and IBM, whose products will be used to tie systems, applications and processes together.

Customer relationship management (CRM)
CRM will see big growth as it is used to harness ecommerce, data warehousing and business intelligence.

Challenges exist for CRM vendors who face further acquisition and territorial invasion from big vendors such as Oracle and PeopleSoft.

Siebel stands alone as a dedicated high-end CRM vendor - but will face a strong challenge from Oracle, who will deliver an integrated ERP-CRM suite by the middle of 2000. Siebel should still remain market leader.

Desktop hardware and software
Organisations will start to implement Windows 2000 around February, and we can expect the usual blood, sweat and tears.

Desktop hardware and software vendors will face increasing competition from companies traditionally outside their arena. Invaders will come from the entertainment sector - watch out for Sony, who launched a combined personal digital assistant (PDA) and digital video disk (DVD) product - with new software and services entrants becoming application service providers, and handheld vendors.

Thin clients are likely to see a good year. Resellers have been overwhelmed with demand from small and medium-sized enterprises.

Windows clients will see the consumer platform and successor to Windows 98, Millennium. With the absence of a price tag, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice will become popular with only a tiny number of organisations.

Mobile devices
The distinction between the wireless access protocol (Wap) phone/PDAs/combo markets will grow as Wap phones become cheaper and increase in popularity.

PDAs can still rely on the executive market, while combos are unlikely to take off unless they can match the size of mobile phones.

Server hardware
New Millennium, new hardware. At least that's what vendors are telling us.

However, while changes will take effect - such as copper and 64-bit chips - many organisations will find that big really is big enough for now.

GartnerGroup also recommends longer product lifecycles.

We will see more initiatives to make it cheaper and easier to buy extra capacity - but companies will be reluctant to invest too much in hardware they don't need, al- though they will want to be covered for ecommerce.

Server operating systems
Next year is being hyped as the year of Windows 2000. However, even Microsoft executives now admit they don't see widespread server adoption until at least 2001.

Windows 2000 will pose a threat to Novell on two fronts: it will stimulate Microsoft's rivalry to Netware, and the Active Directory will begin to pose a threat to Novell Directory Service's (NDS) lead, although its initial impact will probably be limited.

Linux, in particular Red Hat, could gain considerable ground. Dell's decision to put Linux on all its servers could encourage others to follow suit.

Microsoft trial
To paraphrase: we are not at the end, or even the beginning of the end, but at the end of the beginning. Microsoft will almost certainly appeal against any ruling which is too controversial. So don't expect to see everyone's favourite software giant broken up this year.