Top 10 Technologies for 2011

Gartner has come out with the list of 10 key technologies that will greatly impact the technology world in 2011. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for a significant impact on the enterprise sector in the next 3 years. Factors that denote a significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or business, need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with the potential for significant market disruption in the next 5 years. As such, these technologies impact the organizations long term plans, programs and initiatives. Companies should factor these top 10 technologies in their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions regarding them during the next 2 years, says David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 are:

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next 3 years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these 2 extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendors public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (ie, best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumers enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloud sourcing decisions and management.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 bn 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.

Social Communications and Collaboration

Social media can be divided into:

• Social Networking: Social profile management products such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise.
• Social Collaboration: Technologies such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing.
• Social Publishing: Technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and Flickr.
• Social Feedback: Gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.

Given this segmentation, Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video

This will indeed surprise many. Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type as being used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next 3 years, Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users; and by 2013, more than 25% 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. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential for unlocking significant improvements in business results and other success rates exists.

Social Analytics

Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics, and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social network analysis, sentiment analysis and social media analytics.

Context-aware Computing

Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or an objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner, or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the users needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives; and by 2016, one-third of the worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness based.

Storage Class Memory

Gartner sees a huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipments and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages like space, heat, performance and ruggedness. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-down and reboots.

Ubiquitous Computing

According to Gartner, the work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xeroxs 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. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as a calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT.

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. The fabric based infrastructure model abstracts physical resourcesprocessor cores, network bandwidth, links and storageinto pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager, software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real-Time Infrastructure Service Governor software component. FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integratorinternal or external.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in