Gartner IT predictions for 2012 and beyond!
In Gartner’s annual predictions for 2012 two stand out as interesting (from Gartner press release https://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413
- By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
- By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings). Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing.
The first of these suggests a wholesale move to cloud computing as a model, combined of course with outsourcing the procurement and management of the little hardware that is needed. That’s quite an ambitious target, but has fascinating implications for hardware and software providers. Of course, it also suggests that the ability to support businesses running a ‘mixed mode’ of cloud and on premise is a key requirement, since 80% of firms will be either in transition or happy to own and maintain their hardware and software assets.
The rise of India-based companies in the market also suggests that cloud computing will give them massive new opportunities to build on the strengths they’ve already demonstrated over the last decade. However, the rise of Indian-outsourcing was about access to well-qualified developers being available for less cost. An attractive proposiiton. Whether Indian companies will be able to carve out a cloud niche is yet to be seen. It could present opportunities and threats to suppliers and customers alike around the world!
Should be an interesting new decade!
