Green IT has shifted way down the priority list for corporate technologists, according to analyst firm Gartner, which this week released the latest version of its top 10 strategic technology areas list for the coming year.
The strategic technology focuses were released at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Florida, US this week. The report lists the top 10 strategic technologies as follows, with green IT slipping from first position in the previous list, released in late 2007, to last place for next year.
- Virtualisation
- Cloud computing
- Servers, beyond blades
- Web-oriented architectures
- Enterprise mashups
- Specialised systems
- Social software and social networking
- Unified communications
- Business intelligence
- Green IT
The list is considerably different from Gartner's technologies for 2008 — where green IT was named as the number one priority. Other technologies dropping in priority include unified communications, which fell from number two to number eight. Virtualisation leapt up the list from number five to number one.
(Credit: Gartner)
According to a spokesperson from Gartner, the technologies were ranked according to "clear [and] direct business impact", "IT cost savings potential", and "the risk of ignoring" them.
However, Bruce McCabe, managing director of analyst firm S2 Intelligence disagreed. "There is no question that green IT has continued to move up the list of priories," he said.
McCabe said this was reflected in the priorities of leading IT companies. "I just got back from Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, and I was at Intel labs and IBM labs. Everyone over there is very focused on power consumption in IT hardware," he said.
McCabe said that along with power consumption, IT was also focused on larger, economic issues.
"There are other major priorities, principally amongst them right now would be cost control ... but there is absolutely no question [green IT] would have moved up this year compared to last year," McCabe said.
