Gartner Top 10 embraces the Cloud

As in previous years, the analysts at Gartner have unveiled their 'Top 10 Strategic Technologies,' and Jason Hiner provides details elsewhere on ZDNet. The press release is here.

One of the analysts involved (David Cearley) discusses the Top 10 over on YouTube, and posts the information from the press release via his new blog; it will be interesting to see if a conversation ensues there that the 'push' mode of the company press release does not easily permit.

David lists the strategic technologies as;

"Virtualization Business Intelligence Cloud Computing Green IT Unified Communications Social Software and Social Networking Web Oriented Architecture Enterprise Mashups Specialized Systems Servers – Beyond Blades"

It's an uncomfortable mix of hardware, software, business process and mindset, but then so is the world that Gartner's customers inhabit.

Jason quotes the Gartner presentation yesterday, in which the criteria for inclusion were defined thus;

"A strategic technology is 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 dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years. Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology."

There's a lot in this list that makes sense. There's also a lot (even though they never mention it by name) that actually underpins the Semantic Web so dear to readers of this blog; specifically that vision of the Semantic Web that I was grasping at earlier this month.

A Web Oriented Architecture? Cloud Computing? And on down to Enterprise Mashups, Business Intelligence and Social Software & Social Networking.

Connections, Links, and making the data we already have work a whole lot harder. Sounds familiar, eh?

And having Gartner endorse the building blocks in this way just makes it come a whole lot quicker. Gartner's Nick Gall quotes Jim Zimmermann on his blog, writing;

"I had the opportunity to work on several new business presentations to Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM at the time. When working on the presentation, we were told in no uncertain terms that we should not even bother bringing a proposal to Gerstner without including a slide with Gartner’s view on the opportunity. It was amazing that at a company with over 100,000 talented employees, many of them working full-time at evaluating markets and opportunities, that a decision couldn’t be made without Gartner’s blessing!"

Most might not be quite so swayed by the advice of a single external organisation, but analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester do continue to have influence... especially in the Boardrooms of the bigger companies that we all have to reach in taking novel ideas toward mainstream corporate adoption.

So, Gartner, let's see the pieces of the Top 10 drawn together into a compelling vision of where we're all going; an achievable evolution of today's Web that lets consumers and corporates put their data to work, becoming more a valuable asset and less a necessary and unwelcome cost of doing x.