Gartner offers world–class, objective insight on virtually any area of IT. We spend allot of time reading blogs, articles and reports to keep up with the latest industry data, in any of the areas that will affect the learning space over the coming years.  Gartner is one of our favored sources of information.

The Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives and is currently taking place in Orlando Florida. The event provides access and insight to the latest solutions from key technology providers. It’s becoming more and more difficult to stay on top of all the information that’s out there so why not let us do some of the heavy lifting or reading as the case may be and sumarise a few of the key points made thus far.

• The era of the PC has passed. People prefer the mobile UI for accessing apps over browsers. Develop for mobile1st, PC 2nd is new focus. Mobile will be a trillion dollar business.
• Peter Sondergaard’s thought provoking – “Information will be the ‘oil’ of the 21st century” was mentioned numerous times.
• Mark Zuckerberg the 26 year old CEO of Facebook is the next Bill Gate. The future is enterprise social networks.
• We can’t assume that technology that was useful 10 years ago is still relevant today
• The cloud is getting cheaper and easier to use. It’s the number one technology to watch  for 2011.
• 83% of business units are looking at SaaS w/o telling the IT people.
• Other key technologies for 2011 are Mobile Applications and Media Tablets, Social feedback, Video, Next Generation Analytics, Social Analytics, Context-Aware Computing.

Gartner has dropped 40% of its predictions from last year. Many of the new additions are settings the seeds and may not actually have a big impact next year. And in the end, what makes a PC? By 2000’s standards, today’s smartphones could very well be considered more of a computer and less of a phone. What will be the standard in 2020? Super-tablets? Netbooks on steroids? Perhaps. But it is clear that as technology moves forward, users require more and more out of their devices and more types of devices.