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A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks' need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks - by implication, Facebook - would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

"Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers' financial services strategies," reads Weiss' conclusions, "and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users."

One term we've heard more of this past year is "gamification," the transfer of gaming activities and concepts to more mainstream enterprise software. Certainly, this isn't new: corporate games have been around for a long time; Maritz (the HR benefits company) has built a wonderful business using many gaming techniques. But this year it seemed that games were everywhere, and not just Foursquare badges and check-ins. Mainstream brands such as AOL and Dell adopted these techniques, we had the first ever gamification conference this year and Gartner even put it on their hype cycle. (Now we know the trend is already overused.) Big Door put together this infographic that summaries some of these points.

A new Gartner Magic Quadrant report is available this week covering the public cloud computing vendors. Not surprisingly, AWS received top honors, although Terremark, Savvis and CSC were also praised. Bluelock, a smaller vendor, also got props. The report is very detailed in the usual Gartner manner and is a must-read for enterprise IT architects who are evaluating players in this space.

We can't reproduce the graphic, but we did review the entire report, written by Lydia Leong and blogged about by her here.

If we take a completely detached, technology-focused perspective on the subject of transitioning the data center to virtualized architecture, it might appear that the last arguments against taking the plunge have already dissolved. Utilization improves, performance may even increase, power usage decreases, dependency on larger server racks decreases and there's even a case now for security improvement.

There are several ifs that need to be considered. As too many organizations have come to realize, virtualization isn't something you can just do. One major stumbling block before companies can even get onto square one concerns ownership of resources within the company, and how people's jobs depend upon the existing physical structure of data resources.

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, the analyst firm rolled out its top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 this week. It should come as no surprise that cloud is one of the technologies tapped for top ten.

What's a "strategic technology"? The short version is that a strategic technology is one that has the potential for "significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years."

No single Web technology has survived longer on life support than the intranet - the broader goal of employee intercommunication and content management, to which enterprises still aspire. Despite an over-abundance of very capable tools over the years, including content management systems and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, the element that companies have lacked to date has been inspiration. It's as if a construction firm had dumped all the best building materials into one big pit: With that much treasure in one place, how come no one builds houses with it?

This year's version of the spark for inspiration comes from social media, and the realization that while a low percentage of employees uses the company intranet, a higher percentage uses Facebook. Coinciding with this week's Gartner Symposium/ITExpo in Orlando, Florida, where "the social organization" is a principal topic, CMS market share leader OpenText's latest Social Communities 8.1 upgrade adds a curious new feature that's sure to get businesses talking: social data mining.

Research firm Gartner's release earlier this week of an update to its venerated "Hype Cycle" cast a long shadow that hid a startling prediction: At least half of all organizations that host data on behalf of clients will change, or be forced to change, their privacy policies by the end of next year.

The increased awareness of security breaches among cloud providers, especially Amazon, is one reason. The rest, according to Gartner research director Carsten Casper, center around the changing legislative landscape, especially among multiple countries where the disparities between data protection laws appears only to be growing.

Gartner is once again taking a look at the "hype cycle" for technologies and trying to assess where technologies lie along the bumpy road from technology trigger to productivity. This year, Gartner is adding big data, Internet of Things, gamification and consumerization to the Hype Cycle that weren't present in 2010. According to Gartner, private cloud computing has reached the peak level of hype, and cloud/Web platforms are slipping into the "trough of disillusionment" in the face of Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Research firm Gartner has released its study of second quarter global mobile sales and, to the surprise of no one, Android and Apple are dominating the smartphone market. Globally, smartphone sales were near 107.7 million, of which Android was the top performer (43.4% on sales of 46.7 million units) and iOS was third (18.2% on sales of 19.6 million). Between the two, they accounted for 62% of smartphone sales worldwide.

Nokia's Symbian is still clinging to the leader board, with 22.1% of the smartphone market on 23.8 million units sold. That is way down from Nokia's high when it controlled nearly 48% of the world smartphone market. Overall, Nokia is still the world's largest cell phone manufacturer, having sold 97.8 million devices in the quarter, good for 22.8% of the market. Yet, Gartner does not see Nokia's lead lasting into the third quarter and beyond.

With Citrix escalating its fight against VMware, and VMware expanding its arsenal, it's worth taking a look at the current state of the virtualization market. Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report.

The MQ puts all the major players in one of of two quadrants: leaders or niche players. The other quadrants are completely empty.