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Gartner picks tech top 10 for 2009

Virtualisation tops the list

Virtualisation is Gartner's top technology for 2009

Analyst firm Gartner has picked 10 technologies that it believes will have the biggest impact on organisations over the next three years, and has laid out the benefits firms can expect from each technology.

"Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions," said Gartner analyst David Cearley.

To cut down on storage costs, organisations need to consider virtualisation strategies. Even though many organisations have strategic plans in place to adopt virtualisation in storage and client devices, Gartner has predicted that fewer than 40 per cent of organisations will have deployed hosted virtual desktops by 2010.

For increased scalability, Gartner argued that cloud computing will allow companies to grow quickly because it delivers IT capabilities as a service using the internet.

For an agile and interoperable service oriented architecture, Gartner recommends a web-oriented architecture. At the moment, web-centric solutions are not available to address all areas of enterprise computing, but this will change, Gartner said.

To ease and cut the costs of server capacity provisioning, servers will move beyond the blade server stage to computing fabrics.

Today's blades still fix the combination of memory and processors inside a blade, but the evolution of technology will allow server blades to be merged over the fabric to allow them to operate as a large single system that holds the sum of the components from those blades, Gartner predicted.

To deliver more intuitive applications, organisations should consider corporate mashups. "Through 2010, the corporate 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 organisations," said Gartner.

To address increased workloads, heterogeneous server systems will begin to replace specialised server appliances, according to the analyst. Heterogeneous systems are more flexible because they are a mix of pre-built vendor products and the owner's own software.

To engage with employees, organisations should adopt social networking type tools. "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 and being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard," said Gartner.

And to enable business users to make more informed decisions, IT needs to ensure that they are equipped with the necessary business intelligence tools, said Gartner.

Finally Gartner noted that organisations should plan ahead for the future to avoid technology limitations. Communication vendors are becoming more unified and the number of vendors will be reduced by at least 50 per cent, Gartner predicted.

"Organisations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence," it said.

Organisations also need to consider green IT regulations and have alternative plans for datacentre and capacity growth, Gartner concluded.

Gartner picks tech top 10 for 2009

Virtualisation tops the list

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