Specialty hardware named a Gartner top strategic technology for 2009

Gartner just released their list of their 10 top strategic technologies for 2009, and ‘Specialized Systems’ came in at number six on the list. From their press release:

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Gartner, in their best Alan Greenspan-esque obfuscation of a simple concept, is calling for this to be the year that specialty hardware (like Solace) that has been successful in high performance computing applications (like financial services) begins crossing into the mainstream.

It doesn’t happen often, but for once I agree with Gartner!