Gartner reviews top technology trends for 2012

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. These technologies will inevitably impact organisational long-term plans, programmes and initiatives. Organisations should start exploratory projects to look at promising technology candidates and kick off a search for combinations of information sources, including social sites and unstructured data that may be mined for insights into each technology's potential usefulness. Here is what we regard as the top five most important top strategic technologies for 2012:

Media tablets and mobile computing
Users can already choose between various mobile computing form factors. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with multiple intelligent clients. IT leaders need a managed diversity programme to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace, requiring data integration and an increasing demand for social network tools.

Contextual and social user experience
Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with end-users. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices and mobile commerce. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customised content, product or service. Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. On the social front, interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks, using social information as a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Next generation analytics
Analytics is beginning to shift to the cloud and exploit cloud resources for high performance and grid computing and, in 2011 and 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions:

1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics.
2. From analysing historical data to explain what happened to analysing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future.
3. Over the next 3 years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analysed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types, such as text and video, from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyse, brainstorm and make decisions.

Big data
The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies, and requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive, such as in-memory DBMS. Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as required will replace the single data warehouse model.

Cloud computing
While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, the cloud has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase. Oracle, IBM and SAP also all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years.

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