(FORTUNE Magazine) – Yes, these are dog days for technology. Stocks have been hammered. Programmers are out of work. Many companies have disappeared, and those still around have been humbled. And no matter how you look at it, the technologies that businesses rely on are a mess.

In the flush of Internet mania, most businesses overspent wildly on all sorts of disparate software and systems. A lot of it still doesn't work properly. At almost every big company, applications that any idiot knows should be linked--for instance, the sales system and the one that tracks inventory--remain unconnected and autonomous islands of data. Employees were told this stuff would change their lives. Instead they're screaming in frustration.

For the next several years, corporate buyers will be bent on reining in IT budgets; they'll look for technologies that address business problems directly, provide a near-term return on investment, and improve customer acquisition and retention, cost cutting, revenue, or profits. The word from the top is clear: Make this stuff work. Said American Express CEO Ken Chenault at February's World Economic Forum in New York City: "We have not backed off on our efforts to integrate offline and online. We see its value in our numbers." Or listen to Mike Volpi, who runs Cisco Systems' biggest product line--data switches--and sells to just about every Fortune 500 company: "In the last four years the trend was faster and bigger. Now it's about smarter."

Internet mania had its virtues--in theory, the growth of the Net means that everybody can connect to everybody else. In the next few years, technologists will be working to make that a reality. If they succeed, those connections--links between software applications, between suppliers and customers, between companies and consumers, and even between machines that talk directly to other machines--will transform business. "Only connect!" wrote E.M. Forster in 1910. Almost a century later it's the demand of companies that realize the future depends on technology. Here are trends that will strengthen our business connections over the next few years.

Getting it together

Today's biggest challenge to technology at work isn't about technology at all. At the recent Demo tech-product conference in Phoenix, host Chris Shipley put it colorfully: "CIOs gorged on technology the past few years and need a giant Zantac to help digest it all." Getting all the pieces of corporate technology in sync is the top priority.

What does this really mean? One key is connecting the "back end," the mysterious databases and manufacturing and financial systems, with the "front end"--newer, often Web-based sales and marketing applications that touch customers and employees. Siebel Systems dominates the hottest sector of the front end, so-called CRM (customer-relationship management) applications. It surveyed its customers and found that fully 26% of their tech spending was going toward integration. This is one expensive antacid.

"For most companies it's really 1988, and they hope they'll get to the '90s soon," says John Parkinson, chief U.S. technologist for consultant Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. "They still have a 15-year-old architecture, but it has been bent and reshaped by Y2K fixes, the Web, enterprise resource planning, and now CRM." Mainframes still commingle with Unix servers and networks of Windows PCs. A couple of years ago, enterprise application integration software promised to be the way to connect it all up, and EAI applications are still hot. But the best hope for a complete solution lies with the next trend ...

What the heck are web services?

This wins the prize for buzz phrase of the year. John Hagel, a consultant whose book Net Gain helped stir the web revolution, has a book on this topic due out soon. He explains why web services are so appealing: "Integration is the huge issue in IT. Systems just don't talk to each other. And that's what web services are designed to accomplish."

As with most buzzwords, the term is a misnomer. It refers to an approach to building software for the Internet, not the Web (itself an application on the Net). Says Frank Moss, who started Tivoli Systems and sold it to IBM, and is now chairman of web-services startup Bowstreet in Portsmouth, N.H.: "For the first time we've got universal agreement on a set of standards that can make software more automatable and reusable." Web-services standards have confusing acronyms--XML, SOAP, UDDI--but they accomplish something that's simple to understand. Any two pieces of software that are cleaned up with these standards can be compatible with and exchange data with each other, at least in theory. That is a big deal. Says Cap Gemini's Parkinson: "Pretty much everywhere you look there's something businesses would like to do that is difficult, expensive, or impossible because the IT infrastructure is too rigid. Web services offer flexibility."

Web services can make life a whole lot easier for a business and its suppliers and customers. Maytag, for example, knew that salespeople at appliance stores sometimes directed consumers to other brands, even if those consumers walked in intending to buy a Maytag. So Maytag asked a small company called Comergent to use its web-services software to help get those sales without alienating retailers. At maytag.com, a customer can choose the machine he wants, find local retailers that carry it, get up-to-the-minute data on availability and prices, and place an order. Comergent connected the inventory and pricing systems of 3,200 stores to Maytag's internal software. One year after the system went live, Maytag counts it a big success. Customers who buy with the help of the Website spend on average 50% more than walk-in customers; Maytag gets valuable information about its customers; and it hasn't alienated retailers, because they are the ones that actually get the sale of each Web-selected appliance.

There is, of course, a tech industry battle over web services--Microsoft is pushing its "dot-net" approach, while Sun, IBM, and Oracle use Sun's Java software language. The good news is that both camps so far adhere to the same set of web-services standards. That's really good news, because it means that business people everywhere should eventually find systems that work more logically, whoever wins the nerd war.

Let's put on a project!

If web services aim to help computers talk better to other computers, collaboration software aims to help people communicate better with one another. The trends toward working from home and working together from remote locations have been clear for years--and with companies cutting back on travel post-Sept. 11, remote collaboration has become even more important. Besides, it fits the management style of the new economy, in which employees, consultants, advisors, and service personnel work together on problems. Chris Newell, chief technologist at consultant Viant, calls this a move toward "fishnet organizations made up of ad hoc teams."

Collaboration software will propel the trend. For instance, about 80% of loans syndicated by big U.S. banks are now arranged using a secure collaboration service provided by startup Intralinks. A big syndication may involve more than 100 parties--banks, law firms, various professional-services outfits, and investors. All of them can read, and in some cases modify, the documents necessary for a deal on a commonly accessible Website. Then there's "Napster for marketers," which is being developed by former Coca-Cola marketing boss Sergio Zyman. Using peer-to-peer software from Groove Networks, his Zyman Marketing Group has built templates that let ad agencies, designers, and others work together on marketing plans. Zyman CEO Dave Sutton says that pooling all this talent via the Internet will let companies develop and execute the plans more quickly.

I know what you drink

Companies have accumulated massive amounts of data about customers--now they're really about to use it on you. This isn't as Big Brother bad as it sounds; if you're a frequent flier, wouldn't you like the flight attendant to know enough about you to ask, "Do you still prefer Equal in your coffee?" rather than the generic, "What do you want to drink?" The software to make this happen is sold by SAS and Siebel, as well as by Kana and E.piphany, both surprisingly healthy dot-com survivors. Says Roger Siboni, CEO of E.piphany: "The way you create more customer loyalty is by giving people a more consistent experience across every interaction they have with your company." Home-furnishings retailer Pier 1 Imports uses E.piphany software to ensure that no matter how you contact the company--by phone, Web, or e-mail, or in person--the person or machine you're dealing with has easy access to any information Pier 1 has ever gathered about you. The goal: no surprises, no disappointments, and a customer for life.

Making the world safe for data

Protecting computer systems from hackers and viruses isn't sexy work; it's tedious and endless, because as security evolves, so do threats. But over the next few years, without your being aware of it, your company's techies will struggle to safeguard your systems, spending tons of time and money. That's if you're lucky. The biggest risk is that organizations, even post-Sept. 11, will continue to ignore the risks. Let's turn the mike over for a second to the frustrated and outspoken Tom Siebel, CEO of Siebel Systems, whose CRM engineers see the weaknesses of corporate systems all the time: "Anybody with an $885 Dell computer anyplace on the planet could shut this whole country down. Most systems are 100% wide open. Any 14-year-old kid can break into this stuff. I don't think people are sensitive enough to it, or will be until some terrible breakdown. Then six months later they'll allocate $38 billion in the federal budget to deal with it."

Parlez-vous Wi-Fi?

For years the push toward wireless has been misdirected. Carriers overspent creating networks. Dot-commers blew millions creating and promoting dubious applications, like viewing data on a tiny cellphone screen. But a dark-horse technology has emerged that will truly make a difference to businesses. It's called 802.11, or Wi-Fi. Mostly used on laptops and PDAs, Wi-Fi puts out a relatively short-range signal. But unlike the more ballyhooed 3G cellphone technology, it is completely unregulated, so anybody can put it in a network anywhere. It's going into Starbucks, corporate campuses, even homes--a mobile employee's dream. Les Vadasz, who heads Intel's outside investing, predicts that Wi-Fi will become extremely important: "It has immense flexibility and is so convenient. It's just simple." Wi-Fi could well be the future of the unplugged economy, in which people work together from remote locations and tap in wirelessly from all over the world.

You can take it with you

Combine Web services, Wi-Fi, project work, and cheap disk drives capable of storing more data than ever, and it's safe to predict fantastic progress in portable computing in the next couple of years. IBM, for example, recently unveiled its prototype Metapad, a three- by five-inch, nine-ounce box that contains a five-gigabyte hard drive--about 1,000 times more storage than a typical PDA. The Metapad has no screen or keyboard or microphone for speech recognition but is a powerful computer that can be used at work, at home, in the car, or anywhere else you connect it to such devices. Soon products like Metapad will go commercial, and you'll be carrying around something smaller, more powerful, and lighter than today's laptops.

These unplugged devices are the last key building block of the business technology that will change the way we work over the next few years. Silicon Valley isn't readying anything as dramatic as the Internet--venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are shying away from bold commitments. Their promises now involve flexibility and value. Your software programs will probably work better in five years, you'll probably have greater access to your company's data, you may even get treated better as a customer--and you'll experience all this from wherever you happen to be. So what if the Internet bubble has burst--isn't this practicality what business people have wanted all along?

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