O N LY COMPA N I E S T H AT C A N differentiate, innovate and re-invent themselves will survive the economic meltdown and come out stronger once the recession ends. This realisation will drive companies in the next few years to adopt technologies that will help lower their operating costs, improve the way they interact with their clientele and provide a more fl exible and conducive environment to attract the best of talents. Based on this, Delesh Kumar, director of Frost & Sullivan, says that the top 10 technologies that will come into focus next year will be virtualisation, unifi ed communications and collaboration, managed services, info-security, storage (e.g. data duplication), cloud computing, business intelligence, Web 2.0, wide area network (WAN) optimisation and mobility. ‘From our assessment, the top 10 strategic technologies for enterprises in 2010 can be looked at from two angles; one is where companies plan to invest based on their existing requirements and plans, and the second are technologies that are creating a lot of industry buzz globally.’

‘Most of these technologies are interlinked to each other and are driven by key changes occurring in the industry’s ecosystem,’ he adds. He says that cost optimisation is driving a lot of companies to consider technologies such as virtualisation, managed services and cloud computing to manage ICT management cost. ‘This can be seen from the growth of certain segments in the past year. With the recession, companies operating in new business models such as cloud computing have been gaining market traction. Companies need to be able to manage their cost and at the same time introduce solutions that are keeping track of the industry trends. Both of these factors are the exact value proposition cloud computing fi rms offer.’ ‘ F o r e x a m p l e , s a l e s f o r c e . com crossed the one billion sales mark in 2009 and has been able to grow at double-digit on a quarterly basis. Local cloud computing fi rms such as Lava Protocols that resell salesforce.com and Google solutions have also been seeing strong market traction,’ he reveals.