Deloitte's top 2010 trends for technology

This year will be the breakout year for net tablets, according to Deloitte's latest technology sector report. Connected portable devices are expected to offer a more appealing balance of form and function, and are anticipated to be purchased by tens of millions of people in the year ahead.

Deloitte also forecasts that Virtual Desk Infrastructure, a computing model based on thin or stateless clients, centralised applications and processing power, will be taken far more seriously than in previous years. An anticipated one million seats are expected to go thin client this year, with the largest deployments involving tens of thousands of seats. By 2015, thin client may reach 10 per cent of all enterprise client devices.

The CleanTech sector's performance is anticipated to be mixed, according to Deloitte. Although solar demand is likely to grow strongly in 2010 and 2011, some subsidy cuts and cheaper-than-expected electricity rates may prevent that growth from being as strong as some might hope. It is expected that the solar technology subsector will be outperformed by the broader CleanTech industry.

In the past, technology and telecommunications hardware and software manufacturers have targeted products to the enterprise market, specifically the gate-keeping IT department. This year, many enterprise purchasing decisions will be based more on the preferences of individual employees. With the rise of the "prosumer" - employees who buy a phone for both work and play - more and more enterprises are likely to allow employees to choose their own phones, or at least allow prosumer-selected phones to integrate better with enterprise networks.

Enterprise-focused vendors will need to alter sales techniques originally designed to sell to monolithic buyers whose concerns were enterprise in scale. While IT departments will have to become more flexible, best practices are still necessary, such as deleting data on employees' devices if they change jobs. Also, given the faddish nature of consumer sentiment, processes that reduce product churn will be needed. The future of many enterprise computing and telecom tools will likely involve compromises between work and personal life, that is, employees being available 24/7 but allowed to choose their own smartphone.