All business apps will be tailored for social media in five years

Ability to integrate social media information will be essential to enterprise performance

Facebook will become increasingly important to the enterprise

Virtually every business application will tailored for social media within five years, predicts analyst firm Gartner, as it spelled out its vision for enterprise technology in the coming years.

Gartner outlined its top ten disruptive technologies at its annual user conference in Orlando Florida this week. Social media tools featured prominently among those highlighted as having a major role within three to five years.

Gartner predicts that the ability to integrate information from sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Friendster and analyse that information will form an ever-more important part of analysing customer, partner and employee relationships.

Other disruptive technologies identified by Gartner included well-recognised trends such as cloud computing and the exponential growth of mobile computing platforms.

More eye-catching predictions included the fact that the growing sophistication of flash memory could make it suitable for enterprise storage, and that ubiquitous computing – where processing capabilities are built into all manner of objects – will gain traction within the enterprise.

IT leaders need to figure out how these technologies would fit in to their strategy today – even if the decision is to hold of on deployment, said Carl Claunch, an analyst at Gartner. “In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test or more aggressively deploy the technology.”