We expect two main trends to continue to drive business throughout 2008:
- Convergence — a lot of people not normally associated with computers and communications are being drawn in, most notably electricians working in the building industry. With things getting sticky in the housing market, it is likely that a lot of electricians will be looking for alternative sources of revenue;
- Heat in the data centre — its not just the planet’s environment that’s warming up…servers keep getting hotter too with only modest signs that things are going to change any time soon. The data centre environment is going to be a concern for a while yet.
Mid March we will be going to the ELEX show in Harrogate. Given the first item above, you won’t be surprised to know that we’ll be showcasing cable testers aimed at the converged electrician.
Devices for measuring and alerting on environmental conditions keep getting better. We expect that trend to continue throughout 2008. In fact, Sensatronics have just released the first firmware upgrade for their rack-mount environment monitor. I’ll post more fully about that when I’ve collated all of the new features.
In addition, we’ve had good results with network enabled thermometers in non IT environments too. Warehouses and cold storage facilities gain the same benefits from convergence with the network as the IT industry has over the last decade or so.
At the top end of the cable tester market, Agilent continue to build a very fine platform with fibre, 10 gig and alien cross talk capabilities. We can look forward to more great products from them. The great thing with the Agilent approach is that you are freed from the buy, trade-in cycle. I suppose, for the more cynical reader, you replace it with the buy then perform repeated software upgrades cycle. 
With economic conditions uncertain, it looks like 2008 is going to be interesting to say the least. 
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Do you know if Sensatronics is or has improved their SNMP support? I had a client in NYC last year with a old Sensatronics environment monitor, and the only thing it supported was a small private enterprise branch MIB (something like 8 OIDs times 4 sensors). It was a bit of a pain to get into OpenNMS, due to the lack of a system table. Note this was an old model (came with the data center when they bought it from the dot-bomb that built it).
If it had any SNMP support it must be at most 4 years old because, if memory serves, Sensatronics introduced SNMP support in 2004 or thereabouts.
As far as I am aware, the SNMP MIB is pretty similar to the original version with the addition of trap support.
Most software retrieves the environment settings via XML over HTTP.