It’s that time of year again, for posting what’s hot in IT for next year. Gartner kicked it off with their Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010.

I prefer a much shorter list. Here are five you definitely should be considering for 2010 if you haven’t already. Most have been previously written about in wiredFINANCE.

(1) virtualization

(2) cloud services

(3) open source

(4) deduplication

(5) social computing/social networking

If I were to throw in a sixth, it would be smartphones.

What’s not on my list but will be on the lists of others are things like green IT — although you can’t actually buy green IT. The same goes for IT consolidation — it’s a strategy, not a technology. You won’t find SOA on many lists this year because it has been superseded by cloud computing, which can be viewed as SOA on steroids.

So here is Gartner’s list. Gartner generally takes a more long-term, big-enterprise view of things.

1. Cloud Computing: OK, we’re in agreement on this. Looking ahead, cloud services will be a part of almost every organization’s IT strategy. Rarely, however, will it be the entire strategy.

2. Advanced Analytics: No doubt this is hot, but it isn’t for everyone, at least not yet. Most companies are still trying to get their heads around basic business intelligence (BI).

3. Client Computing: This refers to another form of virtualization. Virtual desktops make sense. The problem: no hard ROI. At this point, you have to buy too much centralized server hardware and network bandwidth, which puts your ROI off a long way, like forever.

4. IT for GreenL Unless you are moving or building a new data center, constrained by energy availability, or facing unbearably high energy cost, don’t bother. You will get greener and greener IT with each new IT purchase. The vendors are building in green IT automatically.

5. Reshaping the Data Center: Yes, there have been big advances in data center design, but unless you are constrained by your current data center, there are better things to focus on in 2010.

6. Social Computing: Yes, you need a strategy for social computing and social networking, if only because the new workers you will be hiring tomorrow and in the future have grown up with social computing. That’s what they know and how they operate. Get with it.

7. Security/Activity Monitoring: Security is always important — last year, next year, every year. The nature of the globally connected economy means that you can no longer lock yourself behind the secure firewall. You have to let the world come in, and you must go out. Activity monitoring is just one of numerous new tools.

8. Flash Memory: Extremely fast storage. For organizations in constant need of higher performance, flash is critical. For everyone else, it is way too expensive. The only ROI comes from looking at IOPS (input-output per second). Most organizations aren’t in that situation. As costs drop, you’ll get flash anyway, automatically built into servers and storage as high performance cache.

9. Virtualization for Availability: This is new? Availability has been one of the basic virtualization benefits from the start. OK, they are adding more bells and whistles. but the basics remain the same. You fire up copies of virtual servers wherever and whenever you need them.

10. Mobile Applications: Gartner says that by year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web while the number of useful applications are multiplying fast. As with social computing, almost every new hire will know smartphones. Figure out how to take advantage of them.

If Gartner’s top 10 seem daunting, just stick with my five and save the rest for 2011. ###