Gartner's top-10 'strategic' technologies for 2010

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 22 October 2009 09:18

IT Industry - Market

Gartner has recommended that companies factor into their strategic planning over the next two years the ‘strategic’ technologies the firm has identified as the 10 technologies most likely to impact and transform their business initiatives.

According to Gartner VP and industry analyst, David Cearley, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies, but that companies considering their strategic plans should “determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

Cearley, who says a ‘strategy’ technology is one with the “potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years,” and he says that factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

According to Cearley, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives, and “they may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.”

Cearley also says that 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.”

As for the top-10, Gartner first lists cloud computing, stressing that while using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, it does “re-arrange some and reduce others,” and, 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.”

The other nine strategic technologies which Gartner lists are advanced analytics, client computing, IT for green, reshaping the data center, social computing, security – activity monitoring, flash memory, virtualization for availability, and mobile applications.

With client computing, Gartner says that virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities, and, 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,” Gartner recommends.

And, on green IT, Gartner suggests that IT can enable many green initiatives, and that the use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can “greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials.”

It says that common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking, and that 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.