Gartner ITxpo: Top 10 strategic technologies

San Diego -- Although the economic slump has paralyzed most IT spending budgets, innovation continues to plug along, bringing opportunity for savvy enterprises that are willing to embrace strategic technologies at the right time.

Here at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo Tuesday, Gartner drilled down into 10 technologies poised to mature in the next 18 to 36 months and examined how they can offer companies significant strategic advantage if adopted for the right reasons and at the appropriate time, according to Carl Claunch, vice president and director of research at Gartner.

IM rides atop the list, offering enterprises powerful real-time communication capabilities along with bolstered productivity. Specifically, the presence awareness functionality in IM yields the most benefit, according to Claunch. "The presence capability is the most powerful part of instant messaging," he said. "It gives you a sense of who is there and available so you can be more productive."

Enterprise use of IM today is hampered by the lack of security controls, privacy, and poor integration into business applications and processes, analysts said. Once the critical security and auditing issues are adequately addressed, enterprise adoption will surge.  By 2005, 60 percent of interpersonal data messaging will be based on real-time presence aware servers, according to Gartner research.

Another emerging technology ripe for growth is RFID (radio frequency identification), which can replace bar code scanning with short distance data transmission, according to Claunch. Because it can collect and transmit a considerable amount of information, the technology holds significant promise to improve manufacturing and supply-chain processes, he said.

A key trend enterprises should keep in mind when planning security technology purchases is the emergence of network security platforms. Within a year, these unified management platforms will unite piecemeal security functions such as intrusion detection, firewall blocking, and vulnerability assessment into a single integrated platform, according to Claunch. This trend will begin to unfold later this year and will reach maturity by 2006, he said.

Although grid computing has been riding high on the hype cycle, the technology will offer concrete solutions to large-scale computing applications in enterprises. Grid computing's ability to collect resources from different vendors and sources to address a large problem can help cut costs significantly for pharmaceutical companies and large government research projects, Claunch said. Today, heavy integration and customization is required to implement grids, but the technology will become more accessible once turnkey applications are readied.

Web services, another technology that has been heavily hyped, also can give leading-edge enterprises the ability to reuse existing code and smooth application integration. Although Web services is not yet completely mature, enterprises should not hold off on Web services-based projects, he said. "Uncertainty lies in the upper layers" with issues such as establishing trust and identity protection, he said.

"But the advantages far outweigh the risks. Companies should make use of Web services to develop new applications, put wrappers around existing applications, and reuse existing functionality," he said.

Other strategic technologies corporations should consider include location-based services, speech recognition, real-time enterprise technology, IP telephony, and tablet PCs.