Looking for the next emerging technologies and how they will affect your business? For those interested in long-term IT planning, Gartner has identified several emerging technologies that will become a force in the next five to 20 years. Such technologies will have broad economic, scientific or societal impact and transform your business, according to Ken McGee, vice president and Gartner fellow.

Here are the 7 technologies Gartner calls 'grand challenges,' meaning they have a fundamental issue to be overcome before unfolding:

1. Never having to manually recharge devices. People would love to have batteries charged remotely or their devices powered by a remote source, obviating the need for batteries. This development seems a long way off.

2. Parallel programming. Simulation, modeling, entertainment and data mining would benefit from advances in parallel computing. The challenge is to create applications that exploit multicore architecture by designing the architecture parallel processing environments.

3. Non-tactile, natural computing interface. Interacting without any mechanical interface is the goal, but the challenges remain in detecting gestures and natural language processing.

4. Automated speech translation. The above challenge gets even more difficult when the translation and output must be in target language that is understandable to humans.

5. Reliable long-term storage. The barriers to keeping data more than 100 years include format, hardware, software, metadata, and information retrieval, among many.

6. Increased programmer productivity. As our needs for software grow and the pipeline of students studying software engineering shrinks, output or productivity per programmer must increase. Development tools and reusable code can help here.

7. Quantifying IT deployment. As IT and business converge, we’ll need management accounting metrics that would quantify the consequences of a particular IT deployment (or cost of not doing so).

Amy Schurr is the former managing features editor of Network World.