Top Information Technology Predictions

Gartner continues to investigate the changing balance of power from across its research areas, and selects Internet Technologies as the focus of this year's crystal ball gazing.

Here's our future according to Gartner:

• By 2012, 20% percent of businesses will have no ownership of IT assets. Fueled by technological developments in 2009, such as virtualization and cloud computing, there's a movement toward decreased IT hardware assets and more ownership of hardware by third parties.

• By 2012, India-based IT companies will represent 20% of cloud service providers in the market. Gartner attributes this to companies leveraging their market positions and R&D efforts in cloud computing, resulting in cloud-enabled outsourcing options.

• By 2012, Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks.

• Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop with focus on greater adoption and specialization. However, they will all revolve around Facebook.

• By 2014, building on server vitalization and desktop power management as savings in energy costs, more organizations will be driven by the need to be responsible for carbon dioxide emissions and will include carbon costs in business cases. Vendors will have to provide carbon lifecycle statistics for their products.

• In 2012, 60% of a new PCs total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns it on. In its lifetime, a typical PC consumes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels, but around 80% of a PC's total energy usage occurs during production and transportation. Buyers will be paying more attention to eco labels.

• Online marketing by 2015 will control more than US$ 250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

• By 2014, mobile and Internet technology will help over 3 billion of the world's adults to electronically transact. Emerging economies will see increase in mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. Worldwide mobile penetration rate will get to 90%.

• By 2013, mobile phones will replace PCs as the most common device for Web access.