There’s no doubt that, from an economic perspective, the last year has been challenging for everyone. But within enterprise IT, 2010 will be remembered as a year of great transition.
It’s hard to say that any one trend began or ended in the confines of 2010. But a slew of technology trends each saw at least one major milestone in the course of the year.
We’ve attempted to rank those trends in terms of both their impact and relevance beyond 2010. Some of them, such as private cloud computing, are in their infancy, while some, such as unified communications, are taking longer to adopt in the enterprise than anybody wants to admit.
In tough times, a lot of folks will talk about giving up on enterprise IT all together. But if you look closely at each of the technologies on this list, it becomes apparent that each of them has a significant impact on the role of IT. The end result is that all these technologies together make businesses more dependent on IT than ever. What’s changing rapidly is the way we go about managing IT.
That puts a lot of pressure on IT people to make sure that their skills are current and that they are staying abreast of the latest trends and technologies. It’s quite possible that your organization may not have even gotten around to testing some of the technologies on this list in 2010. But one thing that is almost for certain is that each of these technologies will touch your career in one form or another in the coming year.
In the meantime, we invite you to consider the most significant technology trends of 2010 with one eye looking backward in appreciation while the other looks forward in anticipation.
Click through for 10 of the most important technology trends of 2010.
Desktop computing as we know it is steadily evolving.
A year of steady unification progress.
The key to business and IT alignment heads mainstream.
The nature of analytics changes with platforms such as Hadoop.
Unlocking the real value of data via multi-protocol storage systems.
IT organizations start to realize they can’t scale without it.
The cure is worse than the disease without it.
For the foreseeable future, the cloud is hybrid.
Changing the way we think about mobile computing.
Everything needs to run on a shared infrastructure.