ACM -- Enterprise technology will become more pervasive and useful for businesses through 2005, says Gartner. The Gartner analysts identify 10 technologies expected to make the biggest impact in 2005. Gartner's trend identifications are helpful in my college classrooms as they focus the attention of a Watch List exercise for our first year multimedia degree students. These "top 10 tech items" are useful when walking the flow of the ICT Expo in Dublin this week.
- Instant messaging has already changed the way many companies work, but improved security will allow companies to include the tool in more applications; Gartner reports that instant messaging has reduced its own email load by 40 percent and trimmed voice calls by 70 percent.
- Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) will make wireless networks a trusted alternative to wired networks, says Gartner research vice president Carl Claunch, while the upcoming 802.11i standard will include even stronger encryption algorithms.
- Large businesses especially will benefit from the build-out of standardized taxonomies and vocabularies, which will enable employees and machines to more accurately categorize and search for data.
- Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) will be another big technology in coming years, with companies switching over due to normal replacement cycles, productivity benefits, and cost savings.
- Businesses' IT infrastructure and operations will be increasingly defined by services instead of technological components, reports Gartner, and software-oriented development will allow for modular Web services that can be assembled quickly into enterprise applications, as well as reused throughout the organization.
- Internal IT infrastructure will become more real time and shared across applications instead of compartmentalized and dedicated to single applications.
- In terms of vendor outsourcing, utility computing schemes will allow businesses to reduce risk and match IT outlays more closely with real business activity.
- Further out, Gartner sees grid computing allowing for even more seamless sharing and utilization in enterprise IT, and also predicts increasingly converged network security functions with the exception of anti-spam operations.
- Network security convergence.
- RFID tags.
Dan Farber -- "Top Strategic Technologies for 2005"
Jenny Levine -- "IM should be one of top strategic technologies for libraries"
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