Gartner identifies 2011 tech trends

Research firm Gartner has highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organisations in 2011.

The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010 where they defined a 'strategic technology' as “one with the potential for significant impact on the organisation in the next three years”.

Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt, Gartner says.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include cloud computing, mobile applications and media tablets, and social communications and collaboration.

Also included are; video, next-generation analytics, social analytics, fabric-based infrastructure and computers, ubiquitous computing, storage class memory, and context-aware computing.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses, the research firm says. “It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.”

“Companies should factor these top 10 technologies in their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” David Cearley, vice-president and analyst at Gartner said at the Symposium.

According to Gartner, the next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes.

“Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's 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 consumer's organisation.”

In terms of mobile applications and media tablets, Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion 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,” says Gartner. “There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.”

Social communications and collaboration also has a role to play, according to Gartner analysts.

The umbrella of social communications consists of social networking, social networking analysis technologies - which employ algorithms to understand and utilise human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise, social collaboration such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing, social publishing and social feedback.

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

Video is not a new media form, but Gartner reckons its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly, says the firm.

“Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the 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 three years, Gartner says, 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.

Companies must embrace next-generation analytics, Gartner says, which has the potential to increase 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, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action,” Gartner says.

However, the analysts also point out that while this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.

Gartner says social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organisations, and involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-aware computing features in the to 10, based on the concept of using information about an end user or object's environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user.

“A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customised content, product or service,” the firm says.

Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.

Also featuring is storage class memory, in which Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems.

It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages - space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them.”

Gartner stresses the need for ubiquitous computing, which requires imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT.

Rounding up the top 10, the firm notes fabric-based infrastructure and computers; a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane.