Gartner recently announced its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012, at the Gartner Symposium currently being held in Orlando. Included in the list were in-memory computing, big data and cloud computing. The list reveals a mix of both technologies which are already making a lot of disruption in 2011, such as cloud computing and some lesser talked about technologies such as in-memory computing.

Cloud Computing – Perhaps the most talked about technology of the moment, Gartner predict that the cloud has the potential to make a “long term and broad” impact. Despite the amount of hype currently surrounding the technology, it is still in its infancy, with Gartner predicting the market will continue to develop in 2012 as enterprises move from trying to understand the cloud, to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds.

Big Data – Again, another term which has become widely used in 2011. Gartner notes that the size, complexity and speed of delivery of data has now exceeded the amount traditional data centres can deal with. Thus, this new data requires the development of new “exotic” technologies just to manage the volume of data alone and Gartner believes a range of new technologies to deal with the ‘big data’ problem will cause disruption in 2012.

CIO Insight recently published a slideshow about application adoption trends over the next year. According to a recent survey from SnapLogic, of which over 110 CIOs and other top execs took part, CIOs and other senior tech executives continue to pursue BI, analytics, productivity/collaboration, financial, sales and social media tools, as they strive to integrate IT with their organization’s strategic objectives.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

Aberdeen Research are one of the research firms that have been following the SaaS Business Intelligence trend for a while now. They recently published a paper called “SaaS Business Intelligence: Driving Agility through Self-Service“. The paper ultimately recognizes the fact that the increased adoption of SaaS in the business intelligence field validates that it is increasingly becoming a viable option for BI deployment in all types of organizations.

Instead of giving you a long-winded written summary of the report, we’ve decided to pick out some of the more interesting numbers!

We Are Cloud Launches Bime – Global Business Intelligence to Succeed in the Age of Big Data

Bime with QueryBlender Lets Companies Mine Their Own Business, Mix and Match Data Sets to Turn Questions into Valuable Insights

DEMO FALL 2011, SANTA CLARA, CA, September 13, 2011 —We Are Cloud, the “ICT European start-up of the year,” today announced the release of Version 3.0 of Bime, the global and elegant business intelligence (BI) service for the age of cloud computing, at DEMO Fall 2011.

Welcome to the newest feature in Bime V3.0: The QueryBlender! What is the QueryBlender I hear you ask? Find out in this trailer!

Want to get right down into the nitty gritty details? Read the QueryBlender documentation.

Read our summary of day 3 at Dreamforce 2011 here!

While I was writing this post, I had the B52s (screaming) in the background. The DJ was playing one of their songs, they weren’t actually here in real life… although this wouldn’t have been unrealistic, seeing as during the opening Keynote of M.Benioff there were, amongst others, Neil Young and MC Hammer, who actually testified as being Salesforce users (Salesforce helped them during their tours, for example).

When Prince uses Bime to analyze the opportunity cost in banning the publishing of videos on Youtube… that will be the day 

Access the full list here!

One word: impressive.

I have touched down in San Francisco for the Dreamforce ’11 event.

Here are some numbers, in no particular order:

2 days ago I stumbled across a great article by Derek Singletonat syscon.com.

The article, entitled “Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser“, discusses the new class of SaaS
(or cloud) application vendors and why they are racing ahead at great speed while the rest of the enterprise apps market ambles along with limited growth.

The author covers many of the common benefits of a SaaS solution, including multi-tenant architecture and the ability to be able to scale easily, the positive changes in which software is now evaluated and purchased (e.g. transparent pricing, free trials, flexible licensing etc.) and better UIs and UXs (user interfaces and user experiences).