10 future technologies

What technologies are you planning to track in the coming years? Gartner has identified 10 disruptive technologies that will shape the IT landscape over the next five years. IT leaders should be evaluating these emerging trends and focus on harnessing these technologies to solve business problems.

What follows are some technologies that warrant a place on your radar between now and 2012:

* Social networking: David Cearley, a Gartner fellow, said enterprise applications will begin to offer features found in popular social software such as Facebook and MySpace. These capabilities can help companies improve collaboration and tap feedback from customers.

* Multicore processors: Single-threaded applications won’t be able to take advantage of the power of multicore processors, necessitating an audit to identify apps that will need remediation to meet service-level requirements with multicore.

* Web mashups: These mix content from publicly available sources and are expected to become the dominant model for the creation of new enterprise software. “The ability to combine information into a common dashboard or virtualize it using geo-location mapping software is extremely powerful.

* User interfaces will continue to evolve. You can expect to see organic light-emitting displays (OLED), digital paper and billboards, holographic and 3D imaging, and smart fabric. And you know how a Wii controller senses when and how it is being moved? Three-axis accelerometers will morph with business IT. Cearley said acceleration and tilt can be married with wireless to perform functions like “touch to exchange business cards.”

The complete list also includes virtualization and fabric computing; cloud computing; ubiquitous computing; contextual computing; augmented reality; and semantics.