An article led me to information research firm Gartner’s interesting list of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010. First the short form (not in a ranking order):
Cloud computing, advanced analytics, client computing, IT supporting green initiatives, reshaping the data center, social computing, security based on activity monitoring, flash memory, virtualization for availability, and last but not least, mobile applications.
Some items on this list are well known buzz generators: the cloud, social computing, and mobile. Advanced analytics comes close, at least in the enterprise ‘verse.
Others are less obvious. Flash memory is nothing new, but it is getting cheaper and taking over jobs once reserved for hard drives, with implications not only for mobile devices (more memory!) but also spillover effects on important little details like power supply and cooling.
‘Reshaping the data center’ isn’t really about technology at all, but firms being more careful about paying for fully installed capacity they may not use for years. Provide the infrastructure, says Gartner, but don’t fill the space till you need to.
‘Virtualization for availability,’ on the other hand, is an interesting twist I hadn’t heard before – keeping a virtual machine’s memory updated in more than one location, so that if the machine hosting the VM itself crashes a backup physical machine can step right in to keep the VM running.
Read the original to fill in the rest of the story. It is a good reminder of the variety of fronts that technology is advancing on – some of them all over the news, others less obvious because they work at the back end, and sometimes not technology itself but learning how to handle it.