The UK has between two and four million CCTV cameras in operation. It’s hard to pin the exact number down as there is no requirement to register them, so figures are based on somewhat flaky sales data. What is certain is that the bulk of these cameras use analogue technology which causes a lot of problems in terms of quality, accessibility and reliability.

Over the past few years, IP-based fully digital cameras have grown in demand. The big CCTV vendors such as Axis, Panasonic, Bosch and Mobotix are currently fighting it out for market share. However, these stalwarts have been joined by new entrants from the IT market such as Cisco and D-Link.

The exciting thing for IT resellers is this: CCTV is pure channel. Apart from the odd corner shop with a self-installed dodgy webcam, all sales are initiated by channel partners and there is good margin in it. The cameras themselves are pretty similar, although some pioneers have unique technologies that give them the edge in wireless, distributed or outdoor environments. However, at a basic configuration level, the technology is easily understood by any IT supplier with a basic grasp of IP and storage.

The replacement or installation of a new CCTV systems also fits nicely with other projects like VoIP, network upgrade or videoconferencing, and best of all, the budget often comes out of facilities and not operational.

Many channel partners would discount CCTV as waste of time, but with typical deal sizes at even a small, single site hitting £20,000, and the drip feed commission from offsite monitoring contracts, it seems any IT reseller who simply ignores CCTV is missing out on a nice little earner.

Christine Horton is the editor of PC Pro’s sister site Channel Pro.

The criticisms levelled at Hurd over his tenure as CEO include that of stifling innovation in favour of making money. However, since he took the reins in 2005, HP’s market value has more than doubled to roughly $100bn, so those are some big shoes to fill. To quote Motley Fool analyst Rick Munarriz: “Outside of Steve Jobs at Apple, it’s hard to imagine a CEO that is more important to his company than Mark Hurd to Hewlett Packard. He did a massive turnaround job.”

Like me, you’ve probably read the coverage with interest. However, the real talking point now is where does HP go from here?

It has been reported that the vendor will look outside the company for its new CEO. But whoever it chooses, it will undeniably signal the technological direction the firm will take.

While HP’s most like-for-like competitor is currently IBM, the firm faces a new rival in Cisco, which is publicly stepping on HP’s toes in its efforts to conquer the server market. Analysts are even pointing to Apple as an emerging rival, as HP prepares to enter both the tablet and the smartphone market following its acquisition of Palm.

A list of potential successors from all of these companies is already doing the rounds.

For me, Martyn Reynolds, managing VP at Gartner sums up the situation: “The company needs to be recognised by consumers as a cool brand, a company that makes products that you have to have. And there’s no immediate pressure to do this, so the board has time to make the right choice for the future of HP – and its future customers.”

Christine Horton is editor of our sister site Channel Pro

Those who remember back to the switch from mainframe to client server will recognise another paradigm shift, but there are some drawbacks. Much more technically adept colleagues tell me virtual machines are easy to set up and deploy but gauging performance is much trickier. And even though assets are now sweated harder, performance is degraded as resources are no longer dedicated.

No problem really – just buy more powerful hardware. But if you’re trying to rein in costs, a server upgrade programme is the last thing you really want to do. Ironically, most large virtualisation projects coincide with a server upgrade anyway, so parts of the savings are absorbed by capital investment.

Training is another area of concern; the skill set for designing, deploying and managing virtualised environments is still relatively new. There are no industry standards for the management processes of a virtualised environment and there will be issues as different individuals or teams fumble their way through designing a virtual policy within each environment.

Lastly, there is fear. At a basic level, few IT professionals want to work themselves out of a job. The magic bullet that is virtualisation often reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure. Rows of telex operators or switchboard staff were made obsolete very quickly by modern data input systems and IVR, and although not as extreme, virtualisation could potentially reduce the need for a distinct layer of IT staff.

OK, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate here, as the rise of virtualisation is unstoppable – it provides too many benefits. However, the IT industry needs to arm itself with a counter to the potential issues it brings, both technical and cultural, to ensure the smoothest of sales.

There must be something in the air, because there was much the same feeling of bullish optimism in two of the conferences I attended stateside, both of which were organised by US vendors for their international partners.

And in both, the vendors were attempting to convey an upbeat, “go-get-‘em” approach to their respective sales channels.

Despite kicking off the Cisco Partner Summit with an apology to partners over the ongoing problems with product delivery times (while concurrently directing the blame on Chinese workers), the networking giant’s VP of worldwide partner organisation, Keith Goodwin, gave a keynote speech peppered with references to making “bold moves” and “rewriting the rules” and “owning the game”.

He was clearly setting out to reassure the assembled partners that Cisco was super-confident about making its much-publicised transition into previously unexplored arenas, such as the datacentre – going so far as to compare any doubters to those fools who doubted its move into the voice space in the late 90s.

At the other end of the scale, storage vendor Compellent is a new kid on the block in comparison to a company the size of Cisco. However, it makes a lot of noise for a youngster.

The firm describes its sales approach as “positive-aggressive” (as opposed to positively aggressive), and nothing demonstrated this more than when its VP for sales (and ex-fighter pilot) Brian Bell, raced into the keynote presentation wearing combat gear, goggles and firing a paint gun at a SAN unit. The US partners loved it.

But this wasn’t just a skin-deep theme of “re-writing the rules”; following tough times for both vendors and VARs, there was a need to purvey a feeling of optimism moving forward. It was an opportunity to slap the assembled partners on the back and say “we’re coming out the other side of the recession and everything will be OK”. And this isn’t a bad thing. With some vendors publicly giving their partners the cold shoulder during the economic crises, the channel needs to know it’s still loved. And it appears, at least here, it is.

UPDATE: Compellent have very kindly sent us this photo of Brian preparing for combat. That’s how to get an audience’s attention!

Technologies to make the top ten include Client Computing (think virtualisation, again), Social Computing (personal and work time will mix, darn it) and, rather less exotically, Flash Memory.

Meanwhile, Gartner also points to the rise in mobile apps, stating that despite the plethora of applications for platforms such as the iPhone, it predicts a newer version with identical operating system interface and processor architecture.

But can we trust Gartner to predict the future? Let’s look at its predictions for 2009: apparently we were to expect Enterprise MashUps this year: “Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications.” Maybe it has, but I haven’t noticed. And it’s strangely disappeared from this year’s list.

Green IT is one that’s stayed on the list, but has it really affected companies’ decisions this year?

Unsurprisingly, both lists include Cloud Computing, the buzzword that’s been hovering in the background for an age. However, Gartner predicts cloud-based services will be exploited in a variety of ways by enterprises in 2010, indicating there is some substance to the term, rather than just cumulous puff.

Nevertheless, as Jon Honeyball points out in his post, Microsoft needs to get real when it comes to hosting, there are still huge hurdles to overcome. Will businesses really be able to trust cloud-based services by this time next year?

So do you agree with Gartner’s predictions, for 2009 or 2010? What technologies do you think will make the biggest impact on organisations over the coming years?

Events kicked off on Friday morning when the Daily Mail published an article by one of its columnists, Jan Moir, on the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately last weekend, in which she claims there was “nothing natural”  about the circumstances of the gay singer’s demise, and that Gately’s death struck a blow to the “happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”

It seemed even the Daily Mail had gone too far this time, with the comments attracting overwhelming condemnation for being homophobic, bigoted and hugely offensive.

Leading the online storm of protest were those most high-profile of Twitter advocates, Stephen Fry and Derren Brown, who between them have almost one million followers.

Indeed, the force of the public’s reaction to Moir’s comments was such that  it forced the Press Complaints Commission’s (PCC) website to crash (many visitors to the site were led there by The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker, who provided a link in his “Comment is free” article condemning Moir’s piece), companies such as Marks & Spencer decided to pull their advertising from the online edition of the column, and the Daily Mail quickly changed the offensive headline from “There was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death” to “A Strange, Lonely and Troubling Death”.

It also prompted Moir to issue a statement claiming there had been a “heavily orchestrated internet campaign” against her. This is a view backed up by an article in The Telegraph stating: “Twitter followers, attaching a JanMoir hashtag to their messages, have been proclaiming all afternoon that this is their moment. Socially liberal new media reckon they have humiliated a bigoted, spiteful dinosaur (and embarrassed the Daily Mail, as well).”

However, as one commentator to Charlie Brooker’s reaction the events on The Guardian website put it: “Perhaps she really does envision Stephen Fry stroking his chin in front of a wall of monitors like something out of Watchmen, co-ordinating his global ‘internet campaign’.”

Fry himself tweeted: “Staggering ignorance of social networking and how it works if she thinks public responses like this are, or can be, ‘orchestrated’.”

Elsewhere on Saturday, a video of an old man being verbally abused by a tube worker was posted online, re-distributed on Twitter and YouTube, and as a result, made the Ten O’ Clock news that night. Because of the exposure, the guard has been suspended, Boris Johnson has launched an investigation (he tweeted) and the train company was forced to go on television and reassure the public that that type of behaviour was unacceptable.

Aside from the debate surrounding the nature of Moir’s views (just read the Brooker article), Saturday’s events were fascinating to watch unfold from a ringside seat at the edge of cyberspace. The internet was harnessed in such a way that brought all types of people together with a common view. Yes, links were posted, such as the PCC’s, for people to register their complaints, but more than anything, it was word-of-mouth and the instant availability of information that spurred the events of the day.

In the words of Derren Brown: “Yesterday, first-hand, I saw Twitter achieve two apparent results for civility…Moir’s interpretation was wrong, and betrays a misguided notion about the nature of Twitter and similar forms of networking. There is no orchestration – just the rapid spread of information. Tweets (posts) are passed on, word gets around, and when a Twitter giant like Stephen Fry mentions it, a million people hear and many pass it on themselves.”

Perhaps understandably, she thought that by using capital letters, her fellow employees would PAY MORE ATTENTION to her missives than if she used regular, lower case.

An employment tribunal also heard that Vicki Walker behaved “provocatively” by highlighting the REALLY IMPORTANT phrases in bold or red.  In one office-wide email presented as evidence she had typed in bold blue letters: “TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECK LIST.”

She did say ‘please’ though, which I don’t think is shouty at all.  Mrs Walker said that it was “ridiculous” to describe the email as confrontational, arguing that she was only trying to ensure that her colleagues filled out their forms correctly.

So what is it that we find so offensive about receiving emails peppered with upper case, bright red, bold and underlined instructions? I’ll admit, I think it’s imbuing your own communiqués with a sense of urgency and importance they probably don’t deserve.

Regardless, Mrs Walker was awarded £7,000 ($17,000 NZD) after the tribunal found that she had been unfairly dismissed, as her employer had no email style guide, meaning employees couldn’t be certain about what kinds of communication were deemed unacceptable. But how many companies have email style guides?

Perhaps this may be the safest course of action for some companies.  According to the Daily Telegraph, over-familiar or misjudged emails to clients can costs firms tens of thousands of pounds in lost orders. Quite often I will receive emails from PR executives dotted with smiley/sad faces and even kisses. But I just put that down to them working in PR, and move on.

However, the folks at Microsoft reckon that breaches of unspoken internet etiquette can cost companies in terms of lost orders and offended clients. Last year it teamed up with a British finishing school to compose a ‘netiquette’ guide that explains what is – and isn’t – acceptable behaviour in the internet age.

Since the dawn of email there have been incidents where the recipient has misunderstood a sarcastic or flippant comment, particularly where that good old breakdown in communication happens somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic.

Common mistakes consist mainly of failing to separate personal messages from corporate communication. This includes sending over-familiar emails, making bad jokes (who hasn’t done that?) and flirting with clients online. Less fun that way, you’d imagine, but still a problem, apparently.

Email etiquette is clearly a minefield, which it appears companies will have to navigate very carefully.

Christine Horton is editor of PC Pro’s sister site Channel Pro