Gartner's top 10 strategic IT technologies for 2009

Analyst firm Gartner says it has identified the top 10 strategic IT technologies for 2009.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or high risk of damage from late adoption.

These technologies impact the organisation's long-term plans, programmes and initiatives, said the analyst. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

"Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organisation," said David Cearley, an analyst at Gartner.

"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."

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 are:

• Virtualisation

• Cloud computing

• Servers beyond blades

• Web-oriented architectures

• Enterprise mashups

• Specialised systems (heterogeneous server systems where the owner installs software to accomplish a function)

• Social software and social networking

• Unified communications

• Business intelligence

• Green IT

More on strategic IT:

Watch David Cearley discussing Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies at the Gartner Symposium / ITxpo Orlando 2008 (YouTube)

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