That's according to IDC's new "" report, led by Chief Analyst Frank Gens. ( and CIO.com are owned by the same parent company, IDG.)

In the report, Gens describes a business and technology environment filled with mobile devices and applications, collaboration and social networking systems, and cloud-services delivery models that will fundamentally transform the way both customers and vendors create and consume traditional business applications.

"This new mashed-up generation of business applications that leverage social and collaborative networks and from them--call them 'socialytic' apps," Gens writes, "will bring not only new capabilities to customers and new growth to suppliers but also new competition and threats to traditional leaders."

So just how will these socialytic apps actually help businesses? Gens contends that marketing departments, for instance, could be big beneficiaries: Socialytic apps can help "determine the next best offer through analysis of the behavior of a buyer via the buyer's social interactions," and allow for more effective "reputation monitoring" and fraud detection, he writes. Another emergent area in 2010, Gens offers, will be in people-centric search and BI--"the use of people as a filter to find information."