In one of the latest reports Gartner, the world’s leading IT research and advisory company, revealed its list of top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. The company defined a strategic technology as one which has the potential for significant impact on a business entity in the next 3 years. Factors responsible for such impact include the need for a substantial investment, high potential for disruption to IT, or the risk of late adoption.

These technologies are viewed as strategic because of having enough maturity for entering broad market and providing strategic advantage if adopted early. They also influence the organization’s long-term plans and initiatives.

“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” state Gartner’s representatives. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

Gartner views the top 10 strategic technologies list for 2010 as the following:

1. Cloud Computing – With cloud computing providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled functions to customers. It can be leveraged in a number of ways to develop an application or a solution and helps to reduce IT costs.
2. Advanced Analytics – Advanced analytics is a new step in IT which means not simply collecting information but rather providing simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics to get more decision flexibility for any business process action.
3. Client Computing – The age of virtualization offers new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. Under these conditions, companies should pay more attention to creating a strategic client computing development roadmap for the next several years.
4. Green Computing –Employing environmentally sustainable computing can do a lot in supporting green initiatives. Leveraging e-documents, using tools that reduce energy consumption or disposing of hardware with minimal or no impact on the environment becomes a more and more popular global trend.
5. Reshaping the Data Center – When constructing a data center, cost can be significantly reduced if building only what’s needed for 5-7 years. The saved money can be invested in IT of business development initiatives.
6. Social Computing – Enterprises shouldn’t ignore the role of social profile and support any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems inside the company.
7. Security – Activity Monitoring – Monitoring security associated with malicious activities has become a new challenge for information security professionals. Employing a variety of monitoring and analysis tools helps enterprises efficiently detect and investigate suspicious activities.
8. Flash Memory – This technology is expected to enjoy a more than a 100% annual growth during a few upcoming years and will become strategic in many IT areas such as consumer devices, entertainment equipment, and other IT systems.
9. Virtualization for Availability – With virtualization being one of the main strategic technologies over the previous years, a new element such as live migration for availability enters the scene. It means “the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server”, and is a key to cutting costs and lowering complexity.
10. Mobile Applications – By the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people are projected to have mobile devices with rich environment combining mobility and web. And this market will only keep growing.

“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” sums up Gartner. “When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. 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/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

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