Cloud Computing Tops Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

‘Tis the season for 2010 recommendations, predictions, and resolutions. Following Burton Group and Forrrester Research, Gartner today announced its top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Cloud computing and advanced analytics top the list, in line with many surveys of CIOs this year.

Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

• Cloud Computing. “Enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.”
• Advanced Analytics, which “looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.” eiVia is a leading on-demand provider in this space.
• Client Computing. Standardization of “devices, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.”
• IT for Green. “Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.”
• Reshaping the Data Center. “A pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years.”
• Social Computing. “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.”
• Security – Activity Monitoring. “Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before.”
• Flash Memory. “Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking.”
• Virtualization for Availability. Replicating virtual machines for high availability so that if one virtual machine fails, another immediately continues the processing.
• 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.”

“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.”

Which of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies does your organization plan to implement over the next two years?