Top strategic Green technologies

Image from geekandpoke.typepad.com - geekandpoke/2008/06/

The green economy has moved to the center of the trade and industry recovery in 2010 in the US. At the same time, a political and regulatory framework is being put into place to stimulate rapid expansion of green technologies. 2010 promises to be a very important year as the economy bounces back and investments begin to flow once again.

In a recent report, Gartner analysts identified the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2010. Gartner, Inc. is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. These significant technologies have the potential for considerable impact on businesses, large and small, in the next few years and also may affect organizations’ long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

Early adoption by businesses might enable strategic advantage.
Gartner recommended that companies factor the top ten technologies into their business plan in the next 1-2 years. Although planning does not necessarily mean implementation and investment in all of the technologies, it can help to assess which of them will promote each company’s initiatives.

The identified top 10 strategic technologies were: ??

1. Cloud Computing - Providing scalable information technology (IT) services and infrastructure, on demand, to businesses and consumers. Although Cloud Computing is a broad term, it includes infrastructure by public and private service providers (for example: Amazon and Google), computing/software services, and cloud-based applications.

2. Advanced Analytics – The optimization, simulation, and experimentation of initiatives by using analytical tools and models to predict the most effective business process, enhance decision making, and maximize return on investment (ROI) by listening and analyzing customer feedback, trends, and other data. Analytics supports the creation and adjustment of business strategy, marketing plans, operational business decisions, product lines management, and more.
To read more about Analytics check Experimentation and Analytics –closing the loop from strategy to-execution and How will Analytics shape business.

3. Green IT – Per Gartner research, corporations that commit to transitioning their IT toward sustainability can greatly enhance the organization’s overall environmental and sustainability credentials. For example, using e-documents (going paperless as much as possible), reducing employees travel and increasingly using teleconferencing or webcasts, supporting virtual workforce (telecommuting), implementing data tools to meter, monitor and manage carbon footprint, and other measures, have proved to be financially beneficial.

4. Green data centers – Data centers present businesses with considerable opportunities in becoming sustainable. For most businesses IT operational costs take a significant part of the overall IT expense. Reducing energy consumption, minimizing the hardware farm (without increasing risks), and optimizing performance of applications will all lead to savings in operating expenses and can free up budgets to apply to other projects or investments. For example, cooling is major expense in most IT operations. By reassessing and cutting down the need for hardware, the company will save on capital, space and cooling, and also reduce its carbon footprint.

5. Virtual client computing - Brings new ways of combining client computing applications and capabilities, and reduces the dependency on both the hardware platform and the operating system platform. This agility can also lead to more flexibility in application selection, deployment, upgrades, and scalability.

6. Social computing – The integration of social media and social/community-type software applications in conjunction with the company internal communication systems. To increase productivity and effectiveness, organizations will focus both on use of social software and social media internally and encourage participation in externally enterprise-sponsored and public communities.

7. Security – Be ahead, foresee and act - instead of being responsive to security violations. Security will evolve and move from setting and managing traditional firewalls to monitoring activities, identifying and predicting patterns of security flaws, which will enable the detection and investigation of suspicious activity, as well as provide the ability to respond in real-time to threats.

8. Memory architecture – Increasing the use of flash memory, a faster technology, instead of traditional rotating disks. Mostly known as a USB Flash Drives (also called pen drives, jump drives, thumb drives, key drives and memory sticks) they are currently available in several sizes of up to 16 GB. The technology is fairly new, durable, highly portable, and is not vulnerable to magnets. For larger configurations, Flash memory offers key advantages in space, heat, performance and ruggedness versus the currently used harddrives. Although more expensive, flash memory technologies have been declining in price rapidly.

9. Virtual computing – Optimization of software execution. Although virtualization is not a new technology, Gartner emphasized new elements such as live migration for availability (i.e. running a virtual machine (VM), while the operating system and other applications continue to run as if they remained on the original server) that has longer term implications such as cost cutting, simplifying processing, and increasing systems agility, as needed.

10. Mobile applications - Mobile technology is already flourishing commerce on mobile devices and the Internet, and it includes smart-phones, tablets and E-book Reader devices (like iPad), iPod Touch, and other portable media devices. The trend of mobile applications is growing and includes connectivity to the Web anywhere, on demand TV and video, mobile conferencing (like Skype), content portability, mass shared storage for consumers, cloud computing, and more.

All of these areas provide career opportunities to experienced workforce as well as college graduates.
Garner points out that the above top 10 list is a starting point. Businesses need to adjust their strategies and priorities in light of their industry, their specific business needs, and the technology options available to them.

Source: Gartner Inc. report - Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

RELATED ARTICLES

Tags: technology and startup funding, cleantech business strategies, clean technology trends, green tech entrepreneurs, technology challenges, job trends, technology careers, growing industries, job creation, environmental jobs, environmental trends, sustainable data centers, sustainable corporations