Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 includes virtualization

Last week, Gartner concluded their Gartner Symposium/ITxpo event that took place in Orlando. Here, the IT analysts highlighted and presented their findings of the top 10 technologies and trends that the analyst firm believes will be strategic for most organizations in 2009.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as 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.

Not surprisingly, virtualization made the firm’s top 10 list. However, they didn’t limit virtualization to the widely popular server virtualization technology. They also included storage and client devices because of their rapid movement.

Gartner stated, “Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information.”

Perhaps more interesting to note is the firm’s prediction on VDI adoption:

Despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Also interesting to note, cloud computing has made Gartner’s list of strategic technologies for 2009. In 2008, cloud computing was quickly added to most people’s buzz word bingo games.

Gartner writes, “Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. The key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities ‘as a service,’ 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers.”

And they added, “Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.”