Worldwide IT spending is on pace to grow 7.1 percent in 2011, according to the latest quarterly spending outlook by Gartner, Inc.

Global IT services is forecast to reach $846 billion in 2011, a 6.6 percent increase from 2010. The computing and hardware segment is poised for the strongest growth with spending forecast to grow 11.7 percent in 2011.

In October 2011 Gartner released a press statement predicting what will be the ‘game changing’ technologies for 2011. With the IPad 2 predicted to be the fastest selling item of 2011 does your technology strategy have room for these technologies

Cloud Computing. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor’s public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer’s enterprise.

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.  Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3) Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback – gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.  Gartner predicts that 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.  Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream.

Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions.

Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas.

Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on 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. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee.

Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems.

Ubiquitous Computing. The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox’s PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world.

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers. A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s).

For a full copy of the press release click here.