[elearning] Top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 according to Gartner Group

[ken price]

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221

Gartner Group's forecasting might be useful to inform some educational
technology decisions.  The information below is taken almost directly from
Gartner's press release. The last one looks like it could have been
generated by a jargon creation engine but the rest look reasonable. These of
course apply to the business world but the trends generally affect other
sectors.

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The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

*Cloud Computing.*. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic
sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing
decisions and management.

*Mobile Applications and Media Tablets*. Gartner estimates that by the end
of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile
commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and
the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an
astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. T

*Social Communications and Collaboration*.  Social media can be divided
into: (1) *Social networking*  (2) *Social collaboration* (3) *Social
publishing* (4) *Social feedback*.  Gartner predicts that by 2016, social
technologies will be integrated with most business applications.

*Video*.   Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become
a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by
2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be
dominated by pictures, video or audio.

*Next Generation Analytics.* Increasing compute capabilities of computers
including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a
shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming
possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather
than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to
do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business
action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational
and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock
significant improvements in business results and other success rates.

*Social Analytics.* Social analytics describes the process of measuring,
analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations
among people, topics and ideas.

*Context-Aware Computing*. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of
using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities
connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that
end user. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500
companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016,
one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be
context-awareness-based.

*Storage Class Memory.* Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer
devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems.

*Ubiquitous Computing.*  The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at
Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where
computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate
and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags
and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can
be managed in traditional centralized ways. T

*Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers.*  A fabric-based computer is a
modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate
building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its
basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory,
I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched
interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage
the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model
abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links
and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric
Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is
driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software
component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of
vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or
external.
Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221

-- 
Ken Price
President, TASITE www.tasite.tas.edu.au
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