As the year is approaching its tail end, various research firms are making their predictions for 2010. Most notably for the IT industry last week was Gartner’s release of its forecast for the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010. This list was released during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando by analysts David Cearly and Carl Claunch to the interested attendees lucky enough to be there. The accompanying press release states that 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.”
While forecasts such as these may not be the most scientific in their compilation, they do give a glimpse into the minds of the analysts who have their finger on the pulse of the IT industry. So they are of some interest, but of course must be also be taken with a punch of salt.
Of interest to this blog and the book which we are compiling is that six of the ten technologies are ones which we consider as either partially or fully green initiatives. Those are:
- Cloud Computing
- Advanced Analystics (while it might be a stretch, this could be used in Smart Grid projects).
- Client Computing
- IT for Green (aka IT which enabled Green initiatives)
- Reshaping the Data Center
- Virtualisation (predominatly for live migration and availability)
The image below shows how the list differs from 2009.
It’s interesting to see that Gartner have identified the difference between Green IT and ‘IT for Green’. This is great news for our book since IT enabling a greener society by way of a smaller carbon footprint is a central theme! Indeed even our domain name can be read as either Greening.IT (‘IT’ as in Information Technology), or Greening.it (‘it’ as in society).
Frost & Sullivan also published their forecast for 2010, but with an investment focus. In a presentation titled Global Top 10 Hot Technologies to Invest by the Director CEE Beatrice Shepherd, Green IT was identified as being high up on the list. The reason being that initiatives targeted at improving the energy efficiency of data centres have gained a lot of momentum in the past few years. He went on to say that “we rank high Green IT technologies as one of the top 10 taking into consideration that 18 percent of total energy in the world is consumed by IT. Nowadays, with everybody looking to reduce operating costs, we anticipate a lot of developments in this technology in the short term.
If you have any thoughts on the blog post, please leave a comment. If you would like more information on the book we are compiling and would possibly like to contribute, please contact us.
