Curious enough, I was digging through Gartner's shelves. Here is what I bumped into - Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009. Gartner has identified the following 10 technologies (in the order mentioned below) as the toppers for 2009 -

• Virtualization
• Cloud Computing
• Servers — Beyond Blades
• Web-Oriented Architectures
• EnterpriseMashups
• Specialized Systems
• Social Software and Social Networking
• Unified Communications
• Business Intelligence
• Green IT

There is nothing you might really want to observe with just this list. The curiosity arose when I was trying to compare the above list for 2009 with the list that Gartner released for 2008, which went as follows -

• Green IT
• Unified Communications
• Business Process Modeling
• Metadata Management
• Virtualization 2.0
• Mashup & Composite Apps
• Web Platform & WOA
• Computing Fabric
• Real World Web
• Social Software

It's quiet interesting to observe the fact that Green IT has moved all the way to the bottom of the list. Also, Computing Fabric seems to have disappeared? No, Gartner has preferred to explicitly call it Servers - Beyond Blades this year. In my opinion, Cloud Computing has been the one significant inclusion in the 2009 list of technologies. Yes, indeed this technology is fast catching up and many companies have gone ahead to set up cloud centers. More on cloud computing in a later post.

Green IT is more of a buzzword that is going to be floating around for the next few years. In a nutshell, Green IT is more about how we can implement technologies that are friendly to nature (viz., lower emission, low power consumption, lower heat dissipation, etc).

Below is a video where David Cearley discusses these top 10 technologies at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2008.


With the economic slowdown, these technologies will definitely play a key role in shaping the world and aiding mankind.