Twelve Emerging Technologies to Watch in 2012

The coming year promises to be one where many emerging technologies finally hit their stride. The impact of these 12 emerging technologies could be particularly profound as they each represent a major shift in how IT is not only managed, but ultimately consumed.

In fact, the coming year may witness the mainstream adoption of more emerging technologies than any time in recent memory.

Click through for 12 emerging technologies to watch in 2012.

The advent of Siri in Apple iPhone is likely to drive mainstream adoption of voice recognition across a raft of enterprise applications.

By processing more data in memory, the footprint of the data center shrinks while application performance improves.

Distinctions about levels of storage give way to pools of storage systems that automatically manage data.

IT organizations finally realize that the key to agility is the ability to manage business rules at a higher level of abstraction.

A new standard for mobile applications is very likely to go enterprise-wide in 2012.

The key to bridging the divide between private and public cloud computing resources.

Virtualization of the network finally catches up with servers and storage.

Workload automation tools finally put an end to the platform wars as application workloads begin to dynamically move across virtual servers.

Master data management gets a whole lot easier to manage.

SQL and NoSQL approaches converge in a way that takes Big Data mainstream.

Control over cloud computing resources gets a whole lot more granular.

Access to more data gives rise to fact-based decision making that will be used to automate more business processes than ever.