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The worst is perhaps behind us. Gartners assessment is that in 2010 the
global IT market will grow well. This is a real good news after 2009, which was
one of the worst periods that this industry has ever seen. Gartner estimates
that compared to 5.2% overall decline this year, the global IT spending will
touch $3.3 tn next year, which is a 3.3% growth.
While its true that the IT spending is beginning to pick up, the other fact
is that CIO mindset and approach is also going to change. Gartner experts
predict that 2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth because
for more than 50% of CIOs IT budget will be 0% or less in growth terms.
The challenge before the CIOs is therefore to see the complete picture, and
then align their IT strategies with their business goals. Even though the market
is tough, the role of IT in making the organization more efficient will only go
up. Bigger opportunities are emerging and newer and cost-effective solutions are
on the horizon. Gartner talks about some of them. For instance, context-aware
computing which will be used to leverage information about the end user to
improve the quality of interaction. Similarly, operational technology where
devices, sensors, and software will be used to control or monitor physical
assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity.
Irrespective of the good news about IT spend picking up, Indian CIOs will no
doubt learn from the experience of their peers worldwide. Technologies and
solutions around cloud will bring about a shift from capex to opex model of IT
budgeting. Enterprise users will be more demanding from their IT and need for
applications like business intelligence will be more. Reliability and
availability will be critical, therefore, virtualization will become crucial.
Similarly, changing economic and social environment will lead to adoption of
newer models like social networking.
There will be overall caution, but there are some factors that cannot be
ignored. For instance, the delays in IT purchase are also increasing the number
of aged hardware. Gartner says that in 2010 there will be about 1 mn old
servers, and by 2011 there will be 2 mn of them. Of course, servers are almost
like the backbone of any enterprise IT infrastructure. Old systems will pose
serious risks on all frontsuptime, efficiency, as well as security. The
situation in countries like India is likely to be significantly different. In
the developed nations, IT spend will only slowly improve in 2011, but in India
it will go up significantly in 2010 and 2011. CIOs here will be cautious, but
pressure on them to keep pace with business growth will be much higher. If they
can build a compelling business case for their IT purchase, CEOs and CFOs will
happily agree.
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