Gartner Inc analysts have highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organisations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo held recently.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise 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.
“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organisation,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.” The top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:
Virtualisation
Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualisation in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualisation to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data duplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information.
Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble.
However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organisations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are delivery of capabilities “as a service,” delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and designing for delivery to external customers.
Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly.
As certain IT functions are industrialising and becoming less customised, there are more possibilities for larger organisations to benefit from cloud computing.
Servers -- beyond blades
Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. The organisation tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is in short supply.
This eliminates the need to pay for all three resource types to upgrade capacity.
It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilisation because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.
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