What do you think will be the top IT trends for 2012? Gartner reports its top 10 trends for 2012 in a recent Network World article.

1. Evolution of virtualization: virtualization will drive more companies to treat IT like a business.
2. Big data: unstructured data is predicted to grow 80% over the next five years. Technologies that get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt and higher-end performance optimization will increase in importance.
3. Energy efficiency: IT will need to inventory what compute resources are doing to reduce and optimization power consumption
4. Context aware apps: context-based computing will go beyond the business intelligence applications and will bring data together from social networks and mobile devices.
5. IT Staff: staff retention and retraining become a significant issue as baby boomers continue to retire.
6. Social networks: ignoring social networking is no longer an option for companies.
7. Consumerization: new applications will be developed to address mobile users, companies need a well-defined strategy to take advantage of this development.
8. Compute per Square foot: virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers which can result in better server performance yielding to savings in floor space and energy.
9. Cloud computing: the possibilities for organizations to benefit from cloud computing will continue to increase.
10. Fabrics: further infrastructure convergence to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically.