IT and Society: Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011 identified

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium (ITxpo), being held through October 21 in Orlando (USA).

The first place is occupied by cloud computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets is the second strategic technology identified by Gartner. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth.  

The next in the Top 10 Strategic Technologies come Social Communications and Collaboration as well as other ways of Internet interaction with consumers. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications.

Another crucial trend is Video. It is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Next Generation Analytics, as well as tools of Social Analytics, namely, Context-Aware Computing, that centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user, will enable companies to more precisely identify consumers’ needs. By 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.