Gartner Outlines the Key IT for 2009

Published: October 27, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While a lot of the conversations in the board rooms, corner offices, and cubicles these days are about budgets, and the IT budget in particular since CEOs and CFOs often try to make cuts there first and make-do with the hard and soft wares they have in times of economic crisis, IT spending slows but it has never stopped. And it won't in 2009, either. In fact, there are a whole slew of technologies that companies will deploy regardless of the economic situation--and maybe particularly if the economy continues to sour.

As part of its recent Symposium/ITxpo, an annual event that IT analysts and researchers from Gartner host to talk about all things IT, the company outlined the top 10 technologies that it believed would turn out to be strategic in 2009.

By Gartner's definition--because everything has to be clearly defined in time and space when you are talking strategies and tactics as it lends whatever you are saying an air of weight and probability--a strategic technology is one that has "the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years." So, by definition, these key technologies may only see some movement in 2009, but looking back, we might see this movement was more significant than we might have believed at the time. The other aspects of being strategic, according to Gartner, are that a technology have a "high potential for disruption" to the IT operations of the company or the company overall, that a technology requires a major budgetary commitment, and that a technology be so important that you have to worry about adopting it too late and therefore get trounced by your competition.

"Strategic technologies affect, run, grow, and transform the business initiatives of an organization," explained David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner who put together the top 10 IT list. "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."

Being at forward-thinking IT shops as well as avid readers of The Four Hundred, you are no doubt familiar with the key technologies that Gartner has outlined for next year. Here they are:

1. Virtualization: And not just server virtualization, which is approaching a decade in production on proprietary (OPenVMS and i5/OS) platforms as well as on Unix boxes and which is maturing rapidly on X64 iron, but on storage arrays and client computers. Virtual desktops hosted back in the data center and front-ended by thin clients save money on energy, storage, and administration. Still, Gartner says that by 2010, fewer than 40 percent of corporate users where a virtual PC is appropriate will be using them. People like their PCs and laptops as much as companies like their servers.
2. Cloud Computing: We used to call this utility computing, but somehow that was boring and we put the Internet cloud back in the name. The ability to pay-as-you-go with utility computing, shifting from the capital to the operating sides of the accounting books, is a key factor that will drive cloud computing. But people are leery of letting go of their applications and putting them on other people's servers.
3. Servers--Beyond Blades: What Gartner appears to mean by this is that CPU, memory, and I/O capacity are going to be tracked independently in pools of servers that allow these items to be scaled up as workloads demand. Instead of upgrading all servers to a four-core processors and 8 GB of memory per socket, you only do the upgrades on the boxes you need rather than planning for peaks and standardizing all servers to that spec. I am not sure what the heck Gartner is talking about here, to be honest. I thought blades were the be-all, end all of servers. . . . (You can laugh now.)
4. Web-Oriented Architectures: "The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence." I thought that was SkyNet? But anyway, Gartner says that over the next five years, Web standards will help even more Web-centric application development.
5. Enterprise Mashups: I am not sure how this is not really an aspect of number 4 above, but the analysts at Gartner say that for the next two years, "the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises." So go ahead and RFD tag all of your employees and link them into Google Maps so you can see what they are up to.
6. Specialized Systems: Think of this as half appliance, half general purpose system. Like a Mac OS X machine, only it is a server. A big chunk of the software stack is pre-installed, hardened, and you really can't mess with it, but the general purpose side lets you install your own applications.
7. Social Software and Social Networking: Gartner wants you to add collaboration and social networking to your corporate Website and "adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard."
8. Unified Communications: No question about it, companies want a simplified, cheaper, consolidated way to handle phone, fax, email, chat, and other kinds of collaboration for employees, partners, and customers.
9. Business Intelligence: This is an oldie, but a goodie. BI was the top priority in Gartner's 2008 CIO survey, and that is because CIOs understand they better be able to get some data out of all that machinery in the data center to help keep customers happy and find new customers.
10. Green IT: IT companies are green-washing like crazy, but the fact remains that running a more efficient IT operating can mean saving companies a respectable amount of money. Every penny--or million--counts.

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