[Offtopic] strategic technologies

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter      November 21, 2009 3:00 PM 


 'Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010'


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

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.

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
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.


Virtualization for Availability
Virtualization 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.

According to Gartner, the new emphasis on green IT covers corporate 
issues such as document management, telepresence, teleworking, smart 
buildings, carbon tracking, and logistics.


Client Computing
The dominant client computing model was and still is Windows on a PC, 
according to Jones. However, that model is starting to break down as more 
options become available to IT managers.

He said technologies such as virtual desktops, thin clients and BYO IT 
are challenging this model.


Mobile Applications
Mobile applications are becoming very important to the CIO," Jones 
said. "What we're seeing is as people deliver more business to consumer 
applications, three major B2C architectures have begun to emerge."

Those are SMS, mobile web and native applications delivered by an app 
store.

Although expensive, Jones said developing a native application is the 
best way to reach your customers.


Advanced Analytics
"Analytics is the new face of business intelligence, not just processing 
data after the event, but analysing what's happening now to predict 
what's going to happen in the future," Jones said.

Advanced analytics is about using analytical tools and models to maximise 
business process and decision.

"It's about, for example, predicting fraud instead of detecting fraud," 
Jones said.


Social Software and Social Computing
According to Gartner, three aspects of social computing have grown in the 
enterprise, and therefore must be considered a strategic technology.

* Internal social computing, such as wikis

* Public social computing, such as Facebook and MySpace, not only through 
your employees' use, but also monitoring such networks to identify your 
company's public image.

* B2B social media and customer communities

"You can start building communities of business related customers and 
partners, so they can share information and you can share information 
with them," Jones said. "There are all sorts of ways in which you can use 
social computing as part of your enterprise strategy."


Flash Memory
By 2012, Gartner predicts that flash memory will cost about 16 cents per 
gigabyte, which could open up the potential for technologies such as 
terabyte memory sticks.

"A lot of new and interesting opportunities will be enabled by flash 
memory," Jones said.


User Activity Monitoring (Security)
Jones said security is something IT managers all have to worry about and 
that they must know what all their users are doing across the network.

According to Gartner new types of technologies, network access and 
security attacks means IT managers must be extra vigilant in this area.

"All of the new forms of attack and vulnerability mean we have to pay 
increased attention in monitoring our users and what users are doing over 
the next five years," Jones said.


Reshaping the Data Center
These changes and more force the IT professional to watch for new 
developments and guide their use in the enterprise.

--

Cheers,
Stephen


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