Top 10 technology trends for 2010

The following are 10 most significant technology trends for 2010, based on a survey conducted by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research with almost 1,200 technology and business managers.

1. Green Computing and Energy Efficiency
It is observed that commitment has been greatly increased from 2009 to 2010 across IT manufacturers (in producing Green IT products), data centres and end-users.

2. Public and Private Cloud Computing
IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012.

3. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Beside server virtualization, VDI has begun to make inroads into the enterprise, but it is found to be more complex to implement than server virtualization. 2010 might be a turning point.

4. Mobility, Telecommuting and Virtual Meetings
With the vast penetration of mobile computing devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, netbooks, etc., concerted with the availability of higher wireless bandwidth, business nowadays has become more and more mobile in nature. Control and security are the main concerns though.

5. Centralization, Standards and Governance
This is something new in the list from 2009's, resulting from the alarm triggered from the “Great Recession” and increasingly fragmented computing resources.

6. Knowledge Sharing, Business Intelligence and Social Networking
No doubt Web 2.0 has transformed the landscape and made knowledge sharing a reality. Organizations start to recognize the tremendous value in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

7. Security, E-Discovery and Business Continuity
There are growing need in this area, but cost remains a big issue.

8. Advances in Application Infrastructure
Open source has made its way and sustain its momentum, playing a more and more important role in today's computing world.

9. Investments in Hardware Infrastructure
Virtualization has brought the impact to hardware infrastructure consolidation. It is believed that Intel’s Nehalem processor (1st CPU optimized for virtualized environments) will accelerate the servers refresh cycle. Beside virtualization, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and solid-state drives are also stimulus to this trend.

10. Collaboration, Workflow and Productivity
The extension of productivity and workflow to the mobile environment is a huge trend. We are rapidly moving beyond e-mail into content and collaboration applications.

* The top 10 IT trends above are referenced from an article written by Samuel Greengard in the Baseline Magazine.

You might be interested to explore how the above have progressed from the Top 10 IT trends for 2009 I posted here about a year ago.

I observed that this 2010 trends is organically evolved from the 2009's list, and come closer to actual adoption, implementation and usage, as the technology matured.