About the time you are guzzling your third eggnog this holiday season, you might want to consider the following business IT questions for 2010.

Do you really need a fat client on each desk? Fat clients are the conventional desktop and laptop computers, richly configured with memory and storage and loaded with applications. They are costly to own and operate and increasingly unnecessary in a world of SaaS and cloud services. You can find almost any desktop application you need online at Google and others.

Does Microsoft have your organization’s best interests at heart? Many managers think they have no alternative to Microsoft Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, and a slew of other Microsoft applications. That is no longer the case. Between the cloud, SaaS, and open source, you have a lot of alternatives that are as good or, quite often, much better and may cost less. Check out the SaaS Showplace for starters. more

Smartphones — those slick cell phones capable of e-mail and Web browsing — are rapidly penetrating businesses. Managers everywhere, it seems, are turning up with Research in Motion’s Blackberry device. Increasingly, they also are showing up with Apple’s iPhone, a consumer device. Blackberry, however, remains the device of choice for business, at least for now.

A recent IDC study on mobile device adoption projects 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, which is expected to more than double by the end of 2013. The researchers estimate the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to surpass the one billion mark over the next four years. Some of those likely will be you and your employees.

The increased use of mobile devices in business, not surprisingly, has led Gartner to organize webinars around what it refers to as enterprise mobile platforms. Here is a PowerPoint from one of those events. Gartner separately identified the top 10 mobile applications (below). Infonetics Research also has some interesting insights into the adoption of smartphones here.

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Virtualization is hot, right? Just a couple of weeks ago, it led wiredFINANCE’s list of hot IT for 2010, and back in the spring, readers here were advised to virtualize finance to lower costs and improve performance.

Articles about the joys of virtualization from me and many others have been plastered across the Internet. Here’s one I wrote on virtualization do’s and don’ts for Cisco, and another for AMD, the chip maker, on virtual desktops.

But like every other technology, virtualization has drawbacks that go along with the benefits. Those thinking of pursuing a virtualization strategy in 2010 — a good idea overall — also need to be aware of the gotchas, the things that can undermine a virtualization investment. Here are five to note: more

At the Storage Networking World conference this fall, Computerworld reported deduplication was high on the shopping list of IT managers. Not surprising: Deduplication promises to revolutionize disaster recovery.

Deduplication isn’t exactly new. I have been writing about it for years: here at Business Management, and at Tech Target, and again at Storage Magazine.

The reason is simple: Deduplication makes it practical to back up data to disk. Organizations are being swamped with a flood of data while their own practices cause them to repeatedly store and back up multiple copies of the exact same data. This is supremely wasteful. Deduplication eliminates much of this waste. more

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. more