Top 10 Technologies
Last year, Gartner Inc., a leader in technology research, identified the top 10 strategic technologies organizations should pay attention to in 2012. Gartner defines a strategic technology as a technology that can have a significant impact in the next three years. Of the 10 listed below, which ones do find yourself focusing on when planning events?
1. Media Tablets and Beyond: Tablets will continue to permeate the business world, and IT managers need to prepare for how an organization will use them and how its members will, too.
2. Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces. Windows, icons, menus, and pointers are being replaced with touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Apps are becoming simpler to create and operate, and HTML5 will also provide a long-term model to address cross-platform (iPhone versus Android) issues.
3. Contextual and Social User Experience. Contextually aware products and systems link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. (Think geo-location–based apps). What’s next: augmented reality.
4. Internet of Things. This concept describes how, as the Internet expands, physical items become more connected to it (example: TVs). The products will have embedded sensors, image recognition and near field communication (NFC) technologies.
5. App Stores and Marketplaces. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year.
6. Next-Generation Analytics. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions: embedded analytics, real-time data analysis and complex data acquisition.
7. Big Data. The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies. New ways to acquire and store data are emerging.
8. In-Memory Computing. Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. As cost and availability of memory-intensive hardware platforms reach tipping points in 2012 and 2013, the in-memory approach will enter the mainstream.
9. Extreme Low-Energy Servers. Low-energy servers are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. They are becoming more common for non-complex tasks.
10. Cloud Computing. Cloud computing, which is storing materials in Web space instead of on computer hard drives, has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. Companies including Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft are introducing or improving cloud products.
Tell us what technologies you use when planning events.
