Touchscreen shipments will double this year, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts that 362.7 million mobile touchscreen devices will ship in 2010, a 96.8 percent increase over 2009’s 184.3 million units

Gartner expects that by 2015 more than 80 percent of mobile devices in North America and Western Europe will be touchscreen. Globally, 58 percent of all devices will be touchscreen by that time.

What makes reading the mobile touchscreen market difficult to read right now is that great hypothetical on the horizon – the iPad.

If Apple’s tablet is a success – and all indicators are that it will be an enormous one – then touchscreen computing will accelerate exponentially, and will perhaps be the near-future of computing, as many people not named Bill Gates expect.

The belief is that the iPad will mainstream large-screen touchscreen computing like the iPhone did for phones. Don’t bet against Apple’s ability to change user habits and behavior. Granted, that change in behavior is less dramatic than would be the case with other disruptive devices, thanks to Apple’s marked skill in ‘incremental disruption.’

Apple’s iPad, which according to reports is having slight delays in production -  delays which could limit the amount of devices initially available, which would be great for Apple, getting it into the hands of early adopters and influencers while maintaining the buzz in the general public – is expected to ship between one and five million units this year.

It’s no secret that the future of computing is in mobile. The secret is that the change will happen faster than many people – and brands – think. Despite the success of smartphones and apps, more traditional companies, some of whom are still learning to trust the internet, are hesitant to lead their brand into that market.

But some companies expect mobile to become the primary computing platform by 2013.

Google’s Vice President of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, predicted yesterday that desktops will be dead in three years, killed by mobile devices.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy said at the Digital Landscapes conference in Ireland. “Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible.”

While the spate of layoffs in the technology sector earlier this month were a surprise and an apparent stumble backwards in 2009 employment trends, signs are still pointing to continuing, but slow, recovery from the recession.

Earlier this month, Gartner reported that PC sales are rebounding more quickly than expected (a rebound which should be further accelerated by the holiday season – according to PriceGrabber, PCs are the most desired holiday gifts).

Thanks to the upswing in PC sales, semiconductor sales are also performing better than expected, Gartner announced Monday.

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Gartner has released its list of Top Strategic Technologies for 2010, technologies that could potentially have a big impact on enterprise computing in the next three years: those that could be highly disruptive, warrant significant financial investment or handicap late adopters.

Topping the list is cloud computing, which has been the breakout technology for a while, or, if you follow the tech press, the one that’s most often broken, Microsoft’s Sidekick debacle, losing millions of customers’ data being the latest cloud fail du jour.

Larry Ellison should be happy that, however positive strategists are about the cloud, the biggest press comes after failures, which means that companies have a lot of work to do turning around public sentiment before their products have a chance for significant adoption.

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This is something that yesterday’s post didn’t really touch on, but is a pretty amazing IT expenditure: globally, 4.7 million servers are doing nothing useful, wasting $25 billion dollars a year.

This figure is according to 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, based on the findings of Kelton Research.

“Contrary to popular belief, one of the largest causes of energy and IT operational waste in data centers are servers that are simply not being used,” said Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E.

Three quarters of the server managers polled believe that 15 percent of their servers are doing nothing useful.

“The savings from decommissioning non-productive servers cannot be ignored. Organizations need better information on server efficiency and more effective ongoing server energy management,” Karayi said.

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Huddle.net announced last week the launch of huddle v2, a new version of its online collaboration, project management, document sharing and social networking service.

Huddle allows unlimited users to manage projects, create, edit, share and store files online and have group discussions. Its co-founders describe it as a “viral team collaboration app.”

Huddle v2 features phone and web conferencing, desktop sharing and new customization options.

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Half of smartphone Web traffic in the US comes from the iPhone, according to a report from AdMob Mobile Metrics.

The release of the iPhone 3G last July caused the use of Apple’s smartphone to jump dramatically. In August of last year, iPhones accounted for only 10 percent of smartphone Web traffic. Six months later, it’s 50 percent. Wow.

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Analysts say that the Dow is mimicking the way it acted during the Great Depression. The good news? It will have to act this way another sixteen months to reach the true dustbowls-and-Oakies nadir.

More good news? For Apple, at least, whose sales have yet to be hurt, despite an industry-wide collapse in PC revenue.

TBR analyst Ezra Gottheil says that Apple’s PC unit sales were up 9 percent in December. This while PC revenue overall dropped 18 percent in Q4 2008.

The overall revenue loss was not due to a significant decline in unit sales but to a drop in what people spent, as the average selling price (ASP) of PCs fell 13 percent.

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85% of companies use open source software (OSS), and the remaining 15% will begin in the next 12 months, according to a Gartner study.

Ownership cost, cheaper development, and the ease of implementing new IT projects and software initiatives are the main reasons for the adoption. The software is used most often for customer service, enterprise integration, finance and administration, and business analytics. OSS is also being increasingly used for sales and marketing, customer analytics, field service, ERP and CRM solutions

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Gartner expects enterprise software-as-a-service revenue (SaaS) to more than double by 2012.

There has been a 27 percent increase in SaaS revenue this year, up to $6.4 billion.  “The popularity of the on-demand deployment model has increased significantly within the last four years. Initial concerns over security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become pervasive,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner.

The advantages of SaaS are IT affordability, shorter implementation cycle, reduction of IT costs, and scalability.

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For a long time, people thought Silicon Valley was recession proof. The last two weeks have made it apparent that that is not the case. At least dozens of tech companies - including Adbrite, eBay, Zillow, Pandora - have announced layoffs in October, most of them in the last two weeks.

“The next big thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk management and compliance,” said Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard. Gartner projects budget cuts of up to 20% at some companies.

Yahoo! is expected to cut more jobs than initially announced in January; that announcement could come as early as today. The cuts are expected to cost more than 1000 jobs.

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