Gartner Inc. (IT), the most trusted IT research firm has released a list of the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2008.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

Sun Microsystems’ (JAVA) recently announced annual results for 2007 point to some interesting trends. Here is one company which has pioneered more than a dozen of market leading technologies, but continues to make profits of just $473 million on revenues of $13.8 billion, giving it a profit margin of just over 3%. In comparison, Microsoft’s (MSFT) margins are somewhere around 30%, with IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) coming in around the 10% margin mark. If you think that open source technologies are great for the developer community and the future of technology, but not so for the investors and in a way, for the continued financial survival of the company, then you are spot on.

Let us take Sun’s technologies/solutions/products for example. Java, Sun's flagship solution, rules the application development market and helps developers deploy applications across multiple platforms thanks to its cross-platform independence. If you are using a leading application in a mobile phone or a washing machine or even a super computer or just browsing the web, you maybe using Java Technology. There is no doubt that Java’s ubiquitous nature is largely due to the fact that it is so open and is part of the GNU public license. This which makes it hot among developers who can build on, and develop applications for everything.

In my opinion, the top five companies that pioneered the Web are:

Google (GOOG) with its simple but powerful search engine, which made it possible for someone to discover websites he would have never known.

Yahoo! (YHOO) with its diversified portal, allowing it to becoming a one stop place for browsers to spend time and explore various applications including mail and chat.

Amazon (AMZN) which pioneered business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce, which taught people how to shop online.

eBay (EBAY) which revolutionized customer to customer (C2C) e-commerce, which enabled small businesses, who virtuallly created global businesses without real infrastructure and massive operating expenses.

MySpace, which made it possible for everyone to create a personal page to display for everyone else on the Web.

Salesforce.com, (CRM) the company that pioneered Software-as-a-Service [SAAS] through its revolutionary web-based Customer Relationship Management tool, is making new waves touting a new cloud computing platform – Force.com. Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff and has investors including Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff has claimed that the company has reached 1 million subscribers and it’s on track for more than $1 billion in revenues for its coming fiscal year.

Salesforce.com is a darling with Web 2.0 fans, as it cultivated the platform-as-a-service concept and today, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are trying to catch up with an on-demand CRM offering. SAP offers CRM in a hosted model and is investing millions in building a suite of applications called SAP Business-by-Demand for SMBs in a hosted model. Microsoft recently announced a new version of its hosted CRM software - CRM 4.0, and plans to launch its SaaS version, called CRM Live, in the first half of this year.

Today, every major internet player wants to get into Cloud Computing, formerly known as on-demand computing, and Salesforce.com, the pioneer on Web 2.0, is following suit! Cloud computing is a concept by which computing is moved away from personal computers or an application server to a “cloud” of computers, connected by the Internet. Software manages the computing resources in the cloud and a slew of services including web applications can be served.

News is coming in that Oracle (ORCL) is buying BEA Systems (BEAS), a leader in middleware software, for $8.5 billion! This news comes on the heels of news that Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is buying MySQL, a leading database company for $1 billion! These are two great pieces of a great consolidation story in the enterprise software industry.

BEA will add its strong middleware portfolio to Oracle. But what is really interesting here is the fact that, Oracle for years has been working towards making Oracle Fusion, its own middleware platform, as the key for its success. Oracle has now invested close to $30 billion on its acquisitions to date and this is really shaking the industry to its core.

The information technology market over the past decade has been reshaped by quite a few things. If we had the intelligence to invest in the leaders in these technologies, we would have made billions for sure. E-commerce, social networking, packaged applications etc. have played a role in shaping the markets and our lives in equal measure. IDC (IDC), the leading IT analyst firm makes predictions every year. Though all predictions do not come true, these are measured observations and most of the stocks in these technologies do become hot and there is enormous potential in these verticals. Last year, we saw everybody talking about Software-as-a-service [SAAS] and Web applications.

Take SAP (SAP), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) or Oracle (ORCL). Each one of them offers applications in the service-oriented model and delivers applications over the web today. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace's valuation run into multiple billions of dollars today. Microsoft recently paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, putting the value of Facebook at $15 billion. The PE ratio of facebook, if it’s making profits at all, should be in the thousands by this measure.

SAP (SAP) just announced its 4th quarter results and, like IBM (IBM), the quarter was strong. SAP is saying that fourth quarter revenue is expected to be about 3.25 billion euros, up 10 percent from the previous quarter in 2006. If we exclude the fact that the euro is stronger than the dollar, SAP’s revenue growth was about 14 percent. Revenue for 2007 was 10.26 billion euros, up 9 percent from 2006.

A number of news agencies have reported that SAP (SAP) is looking at a possible bid for Temenos (TMNSF.PK). This is not the first time we have heard this rumor and it won't be the last time. But, there is no denying the fact that banking is one sector which took to automation quite early and SAP really missed a big bus, when it did not look at building a core banking application. Today, SAP has a marginal presence in the banking industry for apps like CRM, ERP etc. But lack of a core banking app has really hindered SAP's penetration of its new age applications like Netweaver into banks.