Gartner has highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organisations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 12.

“Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 include:

Green IT - The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data centre and capacity growth.

Unified Communications - Today, 20% of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80% are already doing trials of some form. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this.

Business Process Modeling - Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in a service oriented architecture centre of excellence, some in a process centre of excellence and some in both. The strategic imperative for 2008 is to bring these groups together.

Metadata Management - Through 2010, organisations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy.

Virtualisation 2.0 - Virtualisation technologies can improve IT resource utilisation and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads.

Mashup and Composite Apps - By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80 %) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years.

Web Platform and WOA - Companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric -A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades.

Real World Web - The term “real world Web” is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds.

Social Software - Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.