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Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/100907-10-strategic-technologies-gartner.html

It's 2008 and time to run down Gartner Group's Top 10 Strategic Technologies. In this October 2007 Network World article, the guru of technology research speaks.

1. Green IT. Topping the list is energy conservation and environmental eco-responsible technologies. Forget the "SUV" and buy "hybrid", CIO's who ignore the need for this socially responsible and environmentally preserving practice will be left behind.
2. Unified Communications. The melding of email, storage, video, PBX, calendaring, IM, conferencing, and collaboration is creating high demand for unified communications. The direct impact on employee productivity is of interest and the need for organizations to unify processes around these areas is in demand.
3. Business Process Management. To have more effective service-oriented architectures there is a need to back-end it with solid BPM initiatives. In this manner SOA will deliver true business value.
4. MetaData Management. Having proper metadata management is critical to having a strong information infrastructure.
5. Virtualization 2.0. More than just simplifying and reducing redundancy and improving capacity utilization, according to Gartner Analyst Claunch - it simplifies the installation and movement of applications, makes it easy to move work from one machine to another, and allows changes to be made without impacting other IT systems, which tend to be rigid and interlinked.
6. Mashups and Composite Applications. Singular function applications are merging to create "mashups" or a combination of applications that contain different functionality contributing to a single performance goal. Unheard of 2 years ago, mashups are rapidly becoming an IT industry standard practice.
7. Web Platforms and WOA. Web-oriented architecture, a step beyond service-oriented architecture, is creating a complete externally hosted web infrastructure. More and more IT services are being delivered as a service and the trend is only increasing.
8. Computing Fabrics. In what could be called flexible provisioning, new server designs are allowing several blades to be "stitched" together in a "computing fabric" that will appear as a single server for an operating system. This appears to allow a sort of computing on demand as processing adjusts to meet users needs.
9. Real World Web. The increasing power of ubiquitous network access and bandwidth is creating a wireless information mecca. Gartner provides an example of a tourist with a special camera that snaps a photo of a landmark and retrieves information about the landmark in the camera. Kind of like an IPhone.
10. Social Networks. Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networking are heeded as the future of collaboration and communication. It is richer medium allowing real-time interaction and collaboration in a more cost effective manner.

There you have it folks, the Top 10 technologies for 2008 as cited by leading research organization Gartner Group. Remember, new things are always coming up - stay tuned for the next wave and have a Happy New Year!