Last week we hosted in Israel Gemini's annual CIO Advisory Board meeting. In the coming days we’ll be blogging quite a bit about our CIO Advisory board - comprised of senior CIOs from leading international firms such as Texas Instruments, Assurion, OmniCare and MoMa - and about the takeaways and insights from the annual meeting. Hint: Innovation and Israel’s competitive advantage were high on the agenda.

In preparation for the annual meeting, we conducted our annual IT Trends survey. Participants of the survey included CIOs and CEOs as well as a few VCs. The results, while not in any way a representative sample of the industry, are quite interesting.

2009, the survey indicates, was clearly the year of virtualization and SaaS. In parallel, efficiency, ROI-driven decision-making and productivity considerations guided the decisions of CIOs. Green IT and the Mobile Enterprise took focus while cloud computing was not as big in budgets as one could expect. Open Source has clearly made its move from an ‘IT Trend’ to day-to-day reality.

What does 2010 hold in store for the CIOs? More of the same, at least vis-à-vis SaaS adoption and the mobile enterprise. Consumerization (i.e., the move of technologies and trends from the consumer market to the enterprise), globalization and remote services were among the trends ranking high on the CIOs agendas. The survey also indicated that CIOs are still keen on experimenting with (and adopting) innovative technologies.

Tune in for the coming blog posts from Gemini’s CIO advisory board annual meeting – lots more to come.