Gartner Lays Out Top 10 Strategic Technologies

Computerworld Australia — At this week's Gartner Symposium in Sydney, the analyst firm presented its top 10 strategic technologies for 2010.

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Gartner senior analyst and mobile guru, Nick Jones, presented the strategic technologies, and defined them as the ones which will impact CIOs within the mainstream enterprise between the next 12 to 36 months.

"Strategic technologies will drive significant change, disruption, modifications to your strategy," Jones said, urging all CIOs to explicitly address them in their strategy, plans and IT architecture.

According to Jones, Gartner develops its top 10 list by sourcing information from CIOs, hype cycles, analyst questions and the top technologies people ask about.

However, he warned this list is not exclusive, and there are likely to be more strategic technologies that CIOs should track throughout the year.

Top 10 strategic technologies 2010:

* Cloud computing

* Advanced analytics

* Client computing

* IT for Green

* Reshaping the data centre.

* Social software and social computing

* User activity monitoring (security)

* Flash memory

* Virtualisation for availability

* Mobile applications

Cloud computing: Jones said cloud computing continues to grow in importance. According to Gartner, the three important areas of corporate use of the cloud are consumption of cloud services, developing cloud based applications and implementing private cloud computing environments.

"Not everything is appropriate in a public cloud at this point in time," Jones said. "Regulatory and maturity issues may mean you don't want to put things on public clouds, but you may want to experiment with cloud computing, so private clouds may be the answer."

He said CIOs are going to need to explore cloud computing at many different levels of the organisation.

Virtualisation for availability: Virtualisation has been very popular in past top 10 lists as a consolidation technique but Jones said "migration and system availability" is a new use that's begun to emerge.

"With live migration what you can do is take the data and state of a virtual machine, take it off one virtual machine and put it onto another virtual machine, and at some point the application can stop executing - the last instruction executes on your previous machine, and the next instruction executes of your new machine," Jones said, adding that you are effectively teleporting your application.

He said this method of technology can then become the basis for high availability systems.

IT for green: Jones said green IT remains important, but acknowledged that many IT managers still felt the cost will outweigh the value of implementation.

"Some of the emphasis on green IT has shifted, it's now not just about making the organisation's IT function more green, it's about using IT to support the overall corporate green goals," Jones said.

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