Gartner: Top 10 disruptive technologies

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Gartner has pin-pointed 10 disruptive technologies that will affect the IT landscape in the next five years in its latest report.

The analyst firm found that as organisations look to improve employee collaboration, certain features will change in the industry.

One such aspect is IT applications, which Gartner said will mirror features found in consumer social software.

Gartner analyst David Cearley asserts that social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook will become beneficial to both employees and customers.

"Social software provides a platform that encourages participation and feedback from employees and customers alike," he said. "The added value for businesses is being able to collect this feedback into a single point that reflects collective attitudes, which can help shape a business strategy."

Gartner also found that multicore and hybrid processors were pushing the possibilities of software forward, although single-threaded applications will not be able to take advantage of their power.

According to Cearley, enterprises should therefore "perform an audit to identify applications that will need remediation to continue to meet service-level requirements in the multicore era."

By 2010 Gartner predicts that web mashups, which mix content from publicly available sources, will be the dominant model for the creation for new enterprise applications.

"Because mashups can be created quickly and easily, they create possibilities for a new class of short-term or disposable applications that would not normally attract development dollars," Cearley said.

"The ability to combine information into a common dashboard or visualise it using geo-location or mapping software is extremely powerful," said Cearley.

Gartner's report also claimed that between 2008 and 2012 we will see information presented via new user interfaces, such as organic light-emitting displays, digital paper and billboards, holographic and 3D imaging and smart fabric.

In addition, Gartner noted other disruptive factors for the IT industry, including virtualisation and fabric computing, cloud computing and platforms, ubiquitous computing, contextual computing, augmented reality and semantics.

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