At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, the analyst firm rolled out its top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 this week. It should come as no surprise that cloud is one of the technologies tapped for top ten.
What’s a “strategic technology”? The short version is that a strategic technology is one that has the potential for “significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.”
That means either an existing technology that’s matured or become suitable for wider use, or it’s an emerging technology that could provide a strategic business advantage for early adopters. If it’s new(ish) and going to impact your organization’s long-term plans or initiatives.
Cloud computing is a no-brainer, of course. It’s already impacting business, and will continue to do so in 2012. But the rest of the ten is just as interesting:
- Big Data
- Extreme Low-Energy Servers
- Next-Generation Analytics
- App Stores and Marketplaces
- In-Memory Computing
- Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
- Contextual and Social User Experience
- Internet of Things
- Media Tablets
Of course, many of these go together. For instance, contextual and social user experience and Internet of Things depend on one another. App stores and marketplaces and tablet computing go hand-in-hand. Next generation analytics depends on big data and in-memory computing, in many cases.
And, as usual, Gartner’s picks are largely things we’ve been covering here at ReadWriteWeb for some time. I might add, we provide the coverage a lot less expensively, too. Interested in Big Data? Check out our Age of Exabytes report from last year on tools and approaches for managing big data.
It is, however, a good list of technologies to watch. What technologies are you keeping an eye on? Anything not on Gartner’s list?
