According to Brad Reed at Network World, Gartner has published a list of the “10 most important strategic technologies of 2009.”

The list includes green IT, mashups, Web-oriented architecture, and unified communications – repeats from last year. It also includes cloud computing, “beyond-blades servers,” business intelligence systems and heterogeneous systems, which are, according to Network World, systems that mix processor types in a single system under one OS in order to incorporate the functions of several different appliances into one server system.

Careful counters will notice that that’s two short. The full list and report is only available to those who purchase it from Gartner’s Web site. It’s like the punchline to the old joke, “How do you hold a technology blogger in suspense?”

But most of the other eight rely on an unstated assumption of a well performing network. Cloud computing and mashups may be getting information from a large number of geographically diverse servers and databases to get the information needed – network connections between those servers need to be monitored and maintained, whether it’s an internal IT department that’s responsible for the infrastructure or the service provider is responsible for it.

Unified communications, of course, requires deliberate and accurate configuration so that voice, video, and data can coexist on the same network. Green IT typically means some sort of consolidation – and either data center or server consolidation requires well functioning networks, as the users move further away from the application’s data.

But its heterogeneous computing that has my imagination.

Since we started establishing universal standards for communication (i.e., UDP, TCP, IP, etc.) the idea has always been that we can be more effective at performing tasks by networking computers together than any one particular computer can be. With multithreading, we can split an application up among multiple processors, with virtualization, we can host an application on any hardware; with cloud computing, we can remove the user interface from the computer that actually does the processing.

Isn’t this the next step? Programs that can be run from anywhere, and processed on any computer – or all computers – on the network, without regard to what type of hardware are in the computers or where the computers are physically located?

Well, what that would mean is that for processing-intensive tasks, such as video rendering, scientific modeling, data processing, etc., the bottleneck will move from the CPU to the network. That means that in such an environment, network performance would be the only IT performance that really matters.

Kinda gives me chills up my spine. Maybe it’s a future that never comes to pass – but I sure hope it does.