For 2011, he expects a continuation of a lot of trends you’ve already been hearing about. You probably already knew about the direction of the general trends, but Marshall has included some interesting figures around the size of various opportunities.

Cloud computing, he says, currently consumes only two percent of the global enterprise storage budget today, and he expects that to grow to between 15 and 20 percent within five years.

He says solid-state storage–which uses flash memory to enhance storage in servers by breaking up the bottlenecks that exist between processors that do the number crunching and hard drives that store the data–is “at a nascent stage,” and that solid-state use in enterprise applications will only get more important in 2011.

Finally, expect more virtualization in the data center. Currently, corporations virtualize about 30 percent of their servers and storage machines. Marshall thinks over five years, that will grow to about 70 percent, and if the conditions are right, 2011 could be a year where the growth rate could accelerate significantly.

According to a joint report from the staffs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the trader chose to use an algorithm to trade the E-mini futures contract, a contract that mimics trading in the S&P 500 stock index. The computer program executed the trade “extremely rapidly in just 20 minutes,” according to the report.

The report found that the trades were initially absorbed by high-frequency traders and others in the market, but soon liquidity dried up for that contract and elsewhere.

The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations have identified the large trader as Waddell & Reed Financial. The report only identifies the trader as a large trader. Waddell has said it didn’t intend to disrupt the market.

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Why the industry is evolving this way is rooted in balance sheets. Over the past two years, Apple Inc. (AAPL), Oracle Corp. (ORCL), Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and six other large tech companies have generated $68.5 billion in new cash, compared with just $13.5 billion for the other 65 tech companies in the S&P 500 Index combined, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data provided by Capital IQ.

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The chip giant’s shares are off four percent, dragging on the Nasdaq Composite and raising some questions about the tech sector generally. This bout of pessimism is probably a bit overdone and reflects more what’s happened in the past few months than what happened yesterday.

Tech shares have been on a strong run, with the S&P 500 information technology group up 15 percent in the last month alone. That’s a pretty quick sprint, and Intel’s merely decent news wasn’t enough to sustain it.

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“For RIMM, we want to take advantage of the stock’s very compelling valuation and upcoming catalysts, including to Storm launch and fiscal Q3 (November) earnings,” writes analyst Simona Jankowski. She notes that RIMM shares are down 62 percent over the last three months, compared with 51 percent for the average stock she covers and 32 percent for the S&P 500, on concerns of slowing demand and margin pressure as a result of competitive offerings from Apple (AAPL) and others.

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The tech-heavy index fell 33 points to 2,619, a two-week low. This despite the release of a report from JPMorgan today that offered a very bullish tech sector outlook for 2008.

While the research outfit predicts revenue growth for the overall Internet sector to decelerate to 21.2% this year from 25.6% last year, it says we can expect the earnings of the Internet companies it covers to grow by 34% in 2008. That’s more than four times faster than the S&P 500.

Among the biggest drivers of that growth: search. JPMorgan says worldwide search revenue will reach $30.5 billion this year, up from $26.2 billion last year. What’s more, it says it will go on to grow at an annual rate of 28% over the next four years, hitting $60 billion by 2011.

Looks like 2008 is going to be quite a year for Google. As will the years that follow.

The tech-heavy index fell 33 points to 2,619, a two-week low. This despite the release of a report from JPMorgan today that offered a very bullish tech sector outlook for 2008.

While the research outfit predicts revenue growth for the overall Internet sector to decelerate to 21.2% this year from 25.6% last year, it says we can expect the earnings of the Internet companies it covers to grow by 34% in 2008. That’s more than four times faster than the S&P 500.

Among the biggest drivers of that growth: search. JPMorgan says worldwide search revenue will reach $30.5 billion this year, up from $26.2 billion last year. What’s more, it says it will go on to grow at an annual rate of 28% over the next four years, hitting $60 billion by 2011.

Looks like 2008 is going to be quite a year for Google. As will the years that follow.