Green IT No. 1 on Gartner’s top 10 techs for ’08

There’s plenty of hype surrounding green technology these days, and while some IT types, anecdotally, are expressing fatigue from hearing about the topic, Gartner suggests that it will be high on organizations’ radar in the coming year.

As reported by Computerworld, Gartner this week released its list of 10 strategic technologies for 2008; that is, technologies “that may have an impact on a business,” according to Gartner analyst David Cearley. Atop the list is “Green IT.”

Green IT’s high ranking shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yes, it’s a trendy topic, but it’s also one driven by real need.

First, companies are struggling with high energy costs to run their datacenters, as well as, for some, a lack of space or sufficient power to run and expand their operations. Emerging products, such as higher-efficiency chips, servers, and CRAC units; power-management software; consolidation technology, such as virtualization, for reducing hardware sprawl; and other innovations can all help put a dent in power bills.

Second, green is, for now anyway, marketing gold as more consumers are eager to see companies become greener. Perhaps more important, more investors are also paying attention.

Third, legislators are also paying attention to issues of carbon emissions, as well as materials companies use in their products. Thus it would behoove companies to find ways to make their operations and product more eco-friendly before the governement does.

The rest of the list of Gartner’s 10 strategic technologies for 2008 is as follows:

2. Unified communications – “Today, 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80 percent are already doing trials of some form.”

3. Business process modeling – “Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in an SOA (service oriented architecture) center of excellence, some in a process center of excellence and some in both.”

4. Metadata management – “Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure.

5. Virtualization 2.0 – “By themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility, and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies … resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency.”

6. Mashups and composite apps – “Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.”

7. The Web platform and WOA – “Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets, and companies must evaluate where service-based delivery may provide value in 2008 – 2010. Meanwhile Web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes.”

8. Computing fabric – “A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades.”

9. Real-world Web – “The term … is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. … For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the Web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real-world Web of augmented reality.”

10. Social software – “Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants … . Social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.”