Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008

Top 10 IT technologies and trends likely to be most important for manufacturers include BPM (business process modelling), unified communications, virtualisation and enterprise mash-up software, according to analyst Gartner, presenting at its US symposium in Orlando this week. Gartner says it defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on a business in the next three years – meaning “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”. Says David Cearley, vice president and analyst at Gartner: “Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making decisions about them during the next two years… The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan.” Top of Gartner’s list is green IT, which it sees becoming more important in 2008. The organisation advises users to consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data centre and capacity growth. “Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centres, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny,” it warns. Next, on unified communications, it asserts that today, 20% of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80% are already running trials. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this, the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the 1970s and 1980s. As for BPM, Gartner suggests that top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles that includes enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts. The strategic imperative for 2008, it insists, is to bring these groups together. Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA (services orientated architecture) development – although the truth is, much of that is likely to be driven by software vendors, not users. Metadata management is another priority, though. Through 2010, Gartner wants organisations to consider implementing customer data integration and product integration as well as product information management – linking these MDM (master data management) initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management strategy. “Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimisation, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support re-use, consistency, integrity and ‘shareability’,” says Gartner. “Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories.” Next is virtualisation – with the usual call to its ability to improve IT resource utilisation and increase flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements and workloads. Gartner reminds users that, on their own, virtualisation technologies are enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and robustness. With the addition of automation technologies – with service-level, policy-based active management – resource efficiency “can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic, based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency.” Moving on to web mash-ups and composite applications, Gartner believes that by 2010, these will be the new norm for software developers, following significant evolution. “Application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mash-ups and in formulating an enterprise mash-up strategy,” it says. As for the web itself and web delivery of applications (software as a service), the analyst suggests that this is becoming a viable option and needs re-evaluation. It points out that web platforms are emerging to provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications and business processes through ‘cloud computing’. Which leads the firm to computing fabric – the evolution of server design beyond today’s blade servers, to technology that allows several blades to be operate as a larger single system image. “The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner’s needs,” explains Gartner. Beyond these, Gartner refers to ‘real world Web’ and ‘social software’. The former, it explains, is about “augmenting the reality that a user faces, not replacing it, as in virtual worlds”. It gives the example, in navigation, of a GPS navigation unit providing real-time directions that react to events and movements. “Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation,” says Gartner. As for social software, it’s about the Web 2.0, which Gartner believes will result in more product innovation and new entrants. “Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings,” says Gartner, observing that the environment is bound to leak into the business context, not least to improve collaboration.