Businesses need to make sure they adopt new technologies for the right reasons, research firm Gartner warns.

Understanding how to justify the value of emerging technologies to business leaders is crucial for IT managers, and can greatly affect business value.

"In many cases, IT is leading the charge toward adopting emerging technologies in order to increase business competitiveness and value," said Gartner's Betsy Burton.

"However, they often lead with a technology focus rather than a business focus, which can lead to wasted investments and fragmented solutions."

She added that IT leaders need to use a business justification model in order to show business leaders the way in "determining business goals and objectives, developing an initiative for exploring possible business scenarios for leveraging emerging technologies, and determining the effect on governance, skills and portfolio management".

Virtualisation is one technology that is becoming increasingly popular in the UK. In fact, Zeus Networks points out, it is more popular here than in the US because of better personal data privacy controls.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.