Attention paid to green IT issues will accelerate and expand in 2008, Gartner Inc. predicts.

The research group released a list of 10 strategic technologies for 2008 that could pose a significant impact on enterprises during the next three years. The impact could include the risk of late adoption, the need for a major capital investment or a high potential for disruption to IT or business.

Green IT topped the list of strategic technologies that companies should consider in their planning processes.

It advised companies to think about potential regulations and have back-up plans for data center and capacity growth. Strong interest in the impact on power grids, carbon emissions and other environmental impacts could lead to future regulations that could inhibit how companies build data centers.

Gartner said the trend of companies promoting their green credentials could influence vendor preferences and policies that impact IT decisions. Power efficiency will emerge as a key placement attribute when companies choose when to schedule workloads on servers.

"Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years," Gartner Vice President David Cearley said in a statement. "Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan."

The other strategic technologies for 2008 include unified communications, business process modeling, metadata management, virtualization 2.0, mashup and composite applications, web platform and WOA, computing fabric, real world web and social software.