Welcome to the Gartner weblog on some of our major new predictions for 2006 and beyond. Every year, we ask our community of hundreds of analysts to present their outlook for the years ahead. Although many of these predictions are tightly focused and of interest only to specialists in a given area, some have broader significance. For example, many of the predictions are important to those working on a particular type of system or project, but they will seem relatively unimportant outside that domain. However, a few predictions are of particularly high impact and significance to a wide audience. Sometimes, that's because they apply directly to us all. Other times, it's because a prediction about what's happening in another space can cause us to think differently about our own situation.

Here, we've chosen the few that rose to the top of the pile, and we invite your comments and discussion via this weblog. As we introduce each prediction, I will invite the authoring analysts to respond to the ideas and thoughts you post and to some of the thoughts I had when I first read it.

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Does any have a prediction or predictions for the field of education for 2006 and emerging technology?

Alan Williams asks if Gartner has any 2006 predictions for the field of education and for emerging technology. Beyond the few predictions we chose to highlight here, for this exercise Gartner published over 40 reports for our clients. Each report covers a particular topic, market or industry and contains a number of key predictions. There is an Emerging trends report with Jackie Fenn as lead author and our Higher Education Research team, lead by Michael Zastrocky also has predictions for the years ahead .