Ten tech trends for 2010 5 January, 2010 By Mark Cox

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

Cloud is once again at the top of the list, but Riverbed says it will become more confusing next year, in large part because more definitions of the cloud will create greater confusion. As more vendors come out with offerings for cloud computing, it may lead to a more concrete and specific definition.

Cloud Computing - public, private and hybrid - will continue to gain momentum. Despite confusion around the cloud, adoption will increase as CIOs take time to better understand the benefits and challenges of the cloud.

Consolidation driven by cost-cutting will continue. Although many enterprises have completed consolidation initiatives in 2009, there will be more consolidation projects at the edge that will drive additional cost savings.

Disaster recovery capabilities will be more important than ever. With everything virtual and flexible, the ability to protect and restore VMs anywhere on demand will become increasingly important.

Investments focusing on virtualization will increase, to increase data mobility, enterprises will look into virtualization efforts.

So will investments on technology that gives quick ROI. IT projects will focus on improving infrastructure and increasing performance with quick ROIs.

End users will be able to connect back more effectively than ever before back to the office. As more cloud and virtualization projects come to fruition, users will be further away from their data. More vendors (including Riverbed) will step up to provide offerings for the cloud that address several key issues including service availability, data and vendor lock-in, security, data transfer bottlenecks and performance unpredictability.

Rich media technologies will soar in the enterprise. Enterprises will increasingly turn to live streaming audio and video, video-on-demand, video conferencing and other technologies for corporate communications, training and customer interaction. Riverbed through partnerships with vendors Microsoft, Qumu and Accordent can reduce video traffic across the WAN by up to 98 percent.

Deduplication will be present in more technologies. IDC's John Gantz claimed earlier this year that the amount of data doubles every 18 months. As a result more deduplication technologies beyond those for network and storage will emerge. Riverbed dedupes the WAN, reducing the exponential requirements for bandwidth. Riverbed also further improves replication of deduped storage, making them even more effective.

Finally, 2010 will see the growth of enterprise edge boxes. Consolidation and virtualization initiatives help increase flexibility and efficiency in delivering valuable services while reducing costs. The deployment of edge boxes will provide another opportunity for more consolidation as enterprises will look to not only consolidate servers but also print servers