Gartner Symposium: IT C-level folks must be prepared for troublesome economy

We are all in for a bumpy ride. what we will see in the next 18 months:

1. Lots of consolidation to come in. Virtualization will continue to grow but expect lot of other contenders contesting for market share. This will create a weird* scenario since the markets will continue to suffer in other sectors, while IT will be the savior (not everywhere though).
   
2. A lot of restructuring to take place.
   
3. A lot of Global Sourcing model adoption. Some large firms have been arrogant to have not chosen this model, but soon they will realize that not having chosen a model and the time lost while resolving to that "state-of-flux", will force them to take drastic measures, sometimes too desperate, risking their firms to more "threats" than "opportunities".
   
4. Acute shortage of expertise (Business analysts, Architects, Tech professionals: I keep saying this but its tme for firms to start banking and training A-players to become the "versatilists" with executional capabilities.)
5. Job seekers (including me) must exercise extreme caution to see what their real value is and go with a party that has (a) A strategy in place (b) clear cut plans for you in their firm (c) has some real data available to help you make the right decision, and (d) obviously timing is everything.
   
6. Overwhelming technological breakthroughs: When I said, in a post earlier, "Are we seeing real innovation?" , I meant it, as we are about to see some real innovation. Storage, Network, Fabric, Data Center Intelligence, Harmonized Worknets, Swarm Innovation etc, will all be equipped and complemented with some really breakthrough technologies. They will certainly overwhelm It leaders and hopefully with intelligence systems, C-level folks will , this time, "actively participate" in decision making. The ones who will indulge in "participative decision making" practices, will eventually come out as "overall winners", others will experience a lot of issues such as retention of expert workforce and eventual losses.
7. Mega mergers yet to come : Big firms like Oracle, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Cisco are going to announce even bigger mergers, not acquisitions. Other players, like Google, VMware will continue to play and tap on the talents of younger, smaller start-ups.
8. Open Source's bold and aggressive entry into corporate world: I am suspecting IBM and Sun will finally come up with a model to bring open source as an aggressive contender for market share.
   

* = The overall "Agile Business Infrastructure" will help sustain the growth, while other markets tend to collapse. This is time for real leaders,that's for sure.

Quoting Gartner here, the above opinions are mine obviously :-):

This situation “confronts you with heavy responsibilities”, Sondergaard warned.

The Gartner research chief said 2007 had been a “milestone year” for IT, which was set to become a £1.5tn market. But a tightening economy would “change the growth rate of the IT industry in 2008”, he cautioned.

The past year had seen other key developments, such as the huge growth of consumer-driven Web 2.0 technologies. In the US this year, the MySpace social network had accounted for 6% of internet visits, “33% more than Google”, Sondergaard said, while 2007 had been “the year of green”, with an increased understanding of the importance of power consumption issues among IT users.

Increased interest in virtualisation and the rise of software as a service had also marked the year out, he added. “Innovations such as these are increasingly visible to business leaders and your non-IT colleagues,” Sondergaard said.

Check out CW UK for the rest.