Author:  Gary Barnett

Not too long ago, Gartner announced its list of top 10 technologies to watch over the next three years. While Gartner talks about each of these technologies as being independent technologies, I think it’s important to note that many of them are interrelated.

Let’s start with virtualization – the first technology on Gartner’s list. Just like storage and desktop virtualization, server virtualization presents a significant amount of opportunity. It allows companies to decrease the number of servers in use while maintaining application isolation and meeting existing application requirements. Obviously, server virtualization leads to cost savings relating to power bills and future hardware investments, but it also means less greenhouse gas emissions, which makes it an important component of Green IT (#10 on Gartner’s list). Virtualization is interwoven with blade servers (Gartner’s #3), as many companies that implement hardware virtualization software concurrently deploy blade servers or other new technology infrastructure profiles, such as Citrix or Terminal Services.

While virtualization is important, it is only one of many tools that are essential in today’s corporate environment. Analytics or business intelligence (#9 on Gartner’s list) is another. Business intelligence tools that leverage open standards like ODBC, OLAP, JDBC and XML are gaining in popularity and will continue to do so because of their ability to consolidate and deliver raw data from various locations and communications channels. In doing so, they make it easy for managers and executives to generate actionable reports that help them make better decisions in the contact center and across the enterprise.  Web-based business intelligence tools go hand-in-hand with Web-oriented architectures (#4 on Gartner’s list).

While much of this technology isn’t new, per se, what’s innovative is how these technologies are coming together, as important components of any successful unified communications (Gartner’s #8) equation. Unlike many of the standalone technologies on the top 10 list, in concert and as part of a complete UC strategy, these technologies are beginning to deliver immediate, quantifiable benefits that extend well beyond the IT organization. They are also helping to facilitate a monumental shift in the way employees communicate with customers and with one another.

To me, UC is not only an emerging technology, but also a very exciting and important concept. I’m not at all convinced that a number eight ranking does it justice.  Are you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Unified Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.