Green Computing Tops Gartner's List of 10 Hottest Technologies

Published: October 18, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Even before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last week for his work on global warming, it should have come as no surprise to you that "green computing" is a very important issue for IT managers today. And it will continue to be the hottest trend in IT going into next year, Gartner said last week.

At its semi-annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, last week, the IT analyst group laid out what it believes will be the 10 most strategic technologies for 2008. While there are no real surprises on the list, it's worthwhile to hear what the industry's most influential IT group is staking its reputation on for the coming year.

So without further ado, the list:

1. Green IT. The possibility of new regulations should have IT managers seriously consider how they can reduce their electricity consumption. Some companies are reducing their "carbon footprint" simply because it's the right thing to do. In either case, efficiency will become one of the top considerations when buying servers and scheduling workloads, Gartner says.
2. Unified Communications. The migration from PBX to Voice over IP (VoIP) is on, with 20 percent already having made the move, and 80 percent contemplating the move. The next three years will see the biggest changes since digital PBX and cellular phones emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Gartner.
3. Business Process Modeling. While BPM lacks the panache of VoIP or green computing, there's no denying the critical role BPM plays as part of a service orientated architecture (SOA) strategy, the analyst group says.
4. Metadata Management. Another sleeper, metadata management nevertheless plays a critical role as organizations strive to centralize their customer and product data. It also plays a big role in SOA, according to Gartner.
5. Virtualization 2.0. We've already seen the effects that virtualization can have on server utilization and application deployment. Gartner says the next phase--Virtualization 2.0--will help us refine the power of the technology through automation.
6. Mashup & Composite Apps. Mashups and composite applications are to corporate intranets what Web 2.0 is to the public Internet. Expect Web mashups to be the dominant development model for the creation of composite enterprise applications by 2010, the prognosticators say.
7. Web Platform & WOA. You've heard of Software as a service (SaaS) and SOA. Combine those concepts, and you have a Web Oriented Architecture, or a WOA, according to Gartner. This delivery model (sometimes called "cloud computing") is just going to become more viable over the next three years, Gartner says.
8. Computing Fabric. Take a bunch of blade servers, connect them using some type of intelligent interconnect that makes them appear as a single operating system image, and voila, you have a "computing fabric." Gartner says this form of server computing is now evolving.
9. Real World Web. Think "geographic computing," where the GPS chip in your iPhone (you do have an iPhone, don't you?) can be used to serve you with applications and data that are specific to your location. Gartner says now is the time to get in on this racket.
10. Social Software. While enterprise IT people are loathe to consider FaceBook as a "real" enterprise app, the fact is that these applications will increasingly find their way onto the corporate intranet, as workers look for new technologies that can augment traditional collaboration tools, Gartner says.