10 | TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL
BETT SHOW PREVIEW
Caroline Wright looks at the market trends revealed by BESA's annual survey of school ICT directors and previews exhibitors at next month's Bet show
F The best Bett A selection of the network providers at Bet 2014
✥ Schools Broadband (stand F238) is an education-specifi c ISP, providing fast, safe and reliable broadband to hundreds of schools across the UK. All of the broad- band packages include full cloud-based security and fi rewall protection as standard and schools can also be provided with mobile device management, wi-fi and VoIP telephony systems as part of the service.
✥ Net-Ctrl’s (stand F121) Kaspersky Lab provides IT security for education institu- tions through a combination of powerful anti-malware protection, fl exible control tools, encryption technology and systems manage- ment tools. Kaspersky’s integrated approach
means you can secure and control all your physical, virtual and mobile devices from a single central management console.
✥ Meru Networks (stand E340) will be demonstrating its virtualised wireless tech- nologies. These are designed to handle high densities of mobile users. Having recently launched its Meru education- grade (MEG) solution, designed to help solve BYOD issues in education, Meru will show how its unique architecture puts the network in control, not the devices. The company will also introduce visitors to its range of 802.11ac solutions – the supe- rior new wireless networking standard.
WI-FI
The move towards more mobile devices is causing a knock-on eff ect on the demand for wireless technologies. In the past, schools may have considered themselves well-resourced with wi-fi if they had access in administrative
irstly, it is important to note that any concerns schools may have had about having the budget necessary to support the desired level of investment in technology are no longer
founded. The British Educational Suppliers Association's (BESA) quarterly market barometer report forecast that ICT expenditure will be higher in cash terms than at any other time on record. When we look at what schools are investing in, it is possibly unsurprising to see a signifi cant shift towards more mobile hardware devices. Until now, the education sector had been a slow adopter of tablet technology. While there has been unprecedented growth in the corporate and consumer markets, schools appeared to be wisely taking a research-driven approach to investing: waiting to see the outcomes of the early adopters. However, of the 1,238 schools surveyed in BESA’s July 2013 ‘ICT in English Schools’ research, 77 per cent of ICT leaders stated that they were under- resourced with tablet computers, only 32 per cent made the same statement about laptops and just 14 per cent feel under-resourced with desktop PCs. Tablets certainly appear to be the hardware technology of the moment.
EDUCATION I N D E P E N D E N T
T O D A Y THE
TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL
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