Oct. 12, 2007 Research firm Gartner Inc. has put green IT at the top of its list of ten strategic technologies for next year, saying that if businesses don't improve data center energy efficiency, the government may force them to do so, ComputerWorld reports.

A "strategic technology" includes anything that may impact the business either positively or negatively meaning that firms that do adopt green IT technologies "may put you at a competitive disadvantage" if you fail to keep up, Gartner analyst David Cearly said at the company's ITExpo being held this week in Stamford, Conn.

Here's a rundown of Gartner's top ten.

1. Green IT: Applying a multifaceted approach to improving energy efficiency in data centers
2. Unified Communications: Converging communications systems in ways both obvious (i.e., telephony, messaging) and innovative (i.e., video data)
3. Business Process Management: Improving the "technology" of business development processes, such as content and document management, systems management, or model-driven development
4. Metadata Management: For example, integrating customer and product data and warehouse data
5. Virtualization: Presenting an abstraction of how computing resources interact with each other to simplify functionality or user experience
6. Mashups: Bringing aspects of various websites together to create a composite application
7. The Web Platform: Creating new web-based platforms for various service applications
8. Computing Fabric: Redesigning servers to pool memory, processors, and I/O card functions into a single resource
9. Real-World Web: Creating an all-encompassing online user experience through better and faster access to networks
10. Social Software: Using podcasts, blogs, and wikis to develop social networks