This year the Daptiv team attended Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 in Orlando for the world’s biggest industry conference focused on IT leaders with over 8,000 senior IT executives (including 2,000 CIOs). Here are some of our takeaways from the Gartner sessions at the event:

(1) Nexus of Forces: Gartner predicted the need for senior IT and business executives to re-imagine business as the result of a powerful nexus of forces — mobile, social, cloud and information. This Nexus of Forces reflects how people want to interact with each other and their information and will make many existing IT architectures, organizational structures and IT strategies obsolete. Gartner forecast that there would be 5 billion mobile devices by 2015 and an 18% annual growth of cloud-based solutions leading up to 2016.

To answer the question whether or not social media software has a place in corporations, Gartner recently released a report predicting that enterprise social software revenue will surpass $769 million in 2011.

The report, called Market Trends: Convergence Restructuring the Enterprise Social Software Market, Worldwide, 2010 and available for purchase here, attributes this 16 percent growth over the $664 million expected to close out 2010 mostly to the same factor that has driven social software's growth in the consumer market --  users' desire to connect to other people, says Gartner.

To be sure, CIOs should have a good understanding about technology and strong business acumen in order to be successful in their roles. But to truly be an effective leader, CIOs must have solid people skills, communicate well and be great at developing partnerships with employees, business peers and other constituents, according to the authors of a new book on the topic.

In The CIO Edge: Seven Leadership Skills You Need to Drive Results (Harvard Business Review Press, Nov. 2010, $29.95), co-authors Graham Waller (Vice President and Executive Partner with Gartner Executive Programs), George Hallenbeck (Director, Intellectual Property Development, Korn/Ferry Leadership) and Karen Rubenstrunk (formerly with Korn/Ferry's CIO practice) examine the key talents CIOs require and how those can be developed.

Gartner has released its second-quarter sales stats for the smartphone market, and there are some interesting -- though not particularly surprising -- results in there.

Riding the popularity of its EVO device, which has been a brisk seller despite its much-maligned battery life, HTC has climbed into the top-ten list of smartphone providers worldwide. Checking in at number eight, the Taiwanese company moved 5.9 million phones last quarter, up from 2.4 million in the same period in 2009 -- good for 139 percent year-over-year growth.

We've been hearing about the workplace of the future since the advent of the cubicle, and likely before. But there's no question that the accelerating pace at which technology is evolving has made the discussion much more than theoretical. The Internet, social networking and collaboration platforms, the consumerization of IT, advances in mobility -- technology is changing the way we work and that change will only get faster.

On that note, research firm Gartner has issued a list of ten ways in which the workplace is going to evolve over the next decade. These aren't new ideas, but it's a nice summary of what appears to be coming down the pipe. Here's a brief rundown:

The software-as-a-service model hasn't lived up to its "early grand promises," declared research firm Gartner today, adding that organizations should take a closer look at their needs when considering cloud-based applications.

According to Gartner, only 10 percent of SaaS implementations actually qualify as "pay as you go," which is often pointed to as a big benefit of the approach. And bad on-premise practices aren't going away just because the software is hosted -- such as shelfware.