Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011 in Insurance space

Here is the top 10 list, with some of Gartner's analysis of the impact of these developments:

Cloud Computing -- "Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management."

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets -- "Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web."

Social Communications and Collaboration -- "By 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy."

Video -- "Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio."

Next-Generation Analytics -- "It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward-looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real time to support each individual business action."

Social Analytics -- or, "the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas."

Context-Aware Computing -- defined as "the concept of using information about an end-user or object's environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user."

Storage Class Memory -- As flash memory proliferates, "Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory."

Ubiquitous Computing -- or, "the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world."

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers -- defined as, "a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or a switched backplane."

Source: www.insurancetech.com