Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technologies For 2010

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

"Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years," said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives."

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

1. Cloud Computing. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners through the cloud.

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2. Advanced Analytics. Optimisation and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximise business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. The trend is to provide simulation, prediction, optimisation and other analytics, not simply information, to empower decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

3. Client Computing. Virtualisation is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.

4. IT for Green. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking.

5. Reshaping the Data Centre. Enterprises should adopt a pod-based approach to data centre construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data centre, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a non-trivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

6. Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing ‘external’ information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally-facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities.

7. Security – Activity Monitoring. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorised user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention.

8. Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

9. Virtualisation for Availability. Virtualisation has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphasises new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer-term implications.

10. Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding. It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.

"This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode," said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.