Gartner: 10 IT Trends That Need Your Attention Now

Those are just a few of the IT trends CIOs of midsize companies need to have on their radar now, said David Cappuccio, managing vice president of Gartner, during his general session presentation at the Midsize Enterprise Summit Sunday in Miami. The event is run by Everything Channel, the parent company of Channelweb.com.

"Some of these are happening now, and some are going to happen, but they're already impacting IT now," Cappuccio told some 300 CIOs attending this week's event. "If you don't pay attention to all of them, you will get blindsided."

For VARs and integrators, the list represents a number of opportunities to get in front of technology issues their customers will be grappling with over the next few years.

Mike Hall, director of information systems at Bowling Green Municipal Utilities in Bowling Green, Ky., said his outfit is now vetting technologies such as virtualization, unified communications and cloud computing.

"We were looking at maybe doing e-mail in the cloud, but our consultant recommended against it. But I hadn't thought about an internal cloud. I liked the idea," Hall said, after attending the session.

Gorton's is exploring options around unified communications, focusing on Microsoft, said Richard Ferrara, director of information technology at the Gloucester, Mass.-based seafood company.

"We're working to understand what it is, what [technologies] we will try to unify and whether different vendors will work well together," Ferrara said.

Here's a closer look at the 10 trends Cappuccio identified:

1. Virtualization: Many servers are underutilized, and they use lots of power just by being turned on. In one recent study, a client with 1,800 physical servers expected to cut its energy bill by nearly 80 percent over four years by implementing virtualization, he said.

2. Data Deluge: "We're all good at managing structured data; it's unstructured data that's a pain," Cappuccio said. That's a problem given Gartner's prediction that enterprise data will grow at a rate of 650 percent in five years, and that 80 percent of that data will be unstructured.

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