Stamford: Gartner, a US-based leading IT research firm, on Tuesday highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011.

According to a company release, Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential to bring out significant impact on the enterprises 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.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that is suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.   As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs, and initiatives.

“Companies should factor these top 10 technologies in their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, Vice President, Gartner in the release.

Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

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. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies and methodologies in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloud sourcing decisions and management.

Mobile applications and media tablets: 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 web. There are already thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone. The quality of the experience of applications on these devices is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors.

Social communications and collaboration: Social media can be divided into (1) social networking through MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that understands and utilizes human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise, (2)Social collaboration through technologies such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing, (3)Social publishing through YouTube and flickr, (4) Social feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, and Amazon.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social Customer Relationship Management (CRM), internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video. Its use as a standard media type in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television, and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points. 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: Increasing compute capabilities of computers and mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run models to predict the future outcome. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential of it to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates does exists.

Social Analytics: Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing, and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics, and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities, or on the social web. It includes social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis, and social-media analytics. These tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups, or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality, or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-aware computing: Context-aware computing 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 end user. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.

Storage Class Memory: Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment, and other embedded IT systems. Flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. It looks more like disk drives where information is placed and it survives power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up valuable space on all the data in a file, while a new explicitly addressed layer permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.

Ubiquitous Computing: As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology. The effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.

Fabric-based infrastructure and computers: A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources such as processor cores, network bandwidth and links, and storage to pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator both internal or external.