Gartner releases top 10 technologies to watch for 2009

Presenting its findings during the Gartner Symposium/Itxpo in the US, David Cearley, vice president and distinguished Gartner analyst, said that its chosen technologies are highly likely to impact companies’ long-term plans, programmes and initiatives. “Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organisation [and] companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where [they] can add value to their business services and solutions.” They should also develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market, he added. Top of the list is virtualisation, and although Gartner acknowledges that much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualisation, it advises manufacturers to look at storage and client devices for the treatment, noting that there will be significant opportunities for de-duplication and cost savings. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs, but, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data centre as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble, explains Cearley – yet he expects fewer than 40% of target users to adopt the technology by 2010. Moving on to cloud (Internet on-demand, service-based) computing, Gartner suggests that, although cost is a potential benefit, the biggest gains are elasticity and scalability of computing power, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but enable companies to grow faster. As for servers, Gartner indicates that further evolution beyond today’s blades will simplify the provisioning of capacity, with manufacturers likely to be able to track resource types, such as memory, separately and replenishes only what they need. The result: reduced costs, better utilisation and no further need to purchase specific system sizes and bundled configurations. As for the rest of the analyst’s top 10 to watch, they are: web-orientated system architectures, enterprise mashups, what it terms ‘specialised systems’ (meaning appliances and heterogeneous systems), social networking, unified communications, business intelligence (still) and green IT. Touching on a few of these, by web architectures, the analyst means “agile, interoperable and scalable service-orientated IT environments”, achievable using modern web-centric technologies and standards. Although these can’t yet address the full breadth of business computing requirements, Gartner advises us to watch this space. Then on the subject of business mashups, Gartner says they’re rapidly moving out of the ‘cool web hobby’ league to enterprise-class systems able to deliver and manage better, joined-up applications. “Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises,” says Cearley. It’s much the same for so-called social software, and Gartner’s advice is simple: “Organisations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional web site or application, and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage.” As for unified communications, the expectation is massive consolidation of the communication vendor market, following the trend of rapidly increasing capability among application servers in terms of voice, data, IM, email, presence etc. The advice: manufacturers need to build detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged. Finally, it’s worth noting that business intelligence was the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, mainly because of its potential to improve management decision making throughout organisations. “Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment,” says the analyst – although wannabe users should note that they need to get their ERP data very clean before starting to use such systems in anger.