<p><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221" target="_blank">http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221</a></span></p>
<p>Gartner Group's forecasting might be useful to inform some
educational technology decisions. The information below is taken almost
directly from Gartner's press release. The last one looks like it could
have been generated by a jargon creation engine but the rest look
reasonable. These of course apply to the business world but the trends generally affect other sectors.<br>
</p>
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<span lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-GB">The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011
include:</span></p>
<p><b><span lang="EN-GB">Cloud Computing.</span></b>.
Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in
place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions
and management.</p>
<p><b>Mobile Applications and Media Tablets</b>. Gartner estimates that
by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of
rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence
of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their
own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and
bandwidth. T</p>
<p><b>Social Communications and Collaboration</b>. Social media can be
divided into: (1) <b>Social networking</b> (2) <b>Social collaboration</b>
(3) <b>Social publishing</b> (4) <b>Social
feedback</b>. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will
be
integrated with most business applications.</p>
<p><b>Video</b>. Over the next three years Gartner
believes that video will become a commonplace content type and
interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of
the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures,
video or audio.</p>
<p><b>Next Generation Analytics.</b> Increasing compute capabilities of
computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are
enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is
becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future
outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past
interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each
individual business action. While this may require significant changes
to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the
potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results
and other success rates.</p>
<p><b>Social Analytics.</b> Social analytics describes the process of
measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and
associations among people, topics and ideas.</p>
<p><b>Context-Aware Computing</b>. Context-aware computing centers on
the concept of using information about an end user or object’s
environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the
quality of interaction with that end user. Gartner predicts
that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have
context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide
mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.</p>
<p><b>Storage Class Memory.</b> Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in
consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT
systems. <br>
</p>
<p><b>Ubiquitous Computing.</b> The work of Mark Weiser and other
researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of
computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As
computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to
communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach
and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized
ways. T</p>
<p><b>Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers.</b> A fabric-based
computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated
from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or
switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises
a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.)
that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the
software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The
fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources —
processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of
resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM),
software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time
Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be
supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely
together, or by an integrator — internal or external.</p>Source: <span lang="EN-GB"></span><a href="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221" target="_blank">http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221</a><br clear="all">
<br>-- <br>Ken Price<br>President, TASITE <a href="http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au">www.tasite.tas.edu.au</a>