Death of IT (?)

Gartner recently released a report indicating that a fifth of enterprises will hold no IT assets by 2012 as cloud computing, virtualization and mobile working practices become commonplace.

The topic, sure to draw mass concern from IT professionals, is a hot button as large corporations are beginning to test the waters of cloud computing. Here’s what other people have to say about the future of IT:

THINKstrategies reported that large corporations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the long deployment cycles, high costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructure demanded by traditional software applications. Many, they say, are realizing that the future of IT is moving away from data center, system and infrastructure management and more toward business process improvement.

Paul Wilkinson from Extranet Evolution stated that Gartner’s research suggests businesses will be looking for applications that can be managed either by their hosting partners or by the vendors themselves and which can be easily accessed by employees from laptops and/or smartphones. Wilkinson explains that we are not yet at a stage where sophisticated applications such as CAD or BIM applications can be easily managed on a cloud-based architecture, so the Gartner vision may take a little longer to materialize across various sectors.

In May, 2008, Gartner, Inc. predicted that social networking technologies, Web mashups, multicore and hybrid processors and cloud computing would be amongst the ten most disruptive technologies that will shape the IT landscape over the next five years. Less than two years later, Gartners looks to be on track.

The Cloud Computing Journal polled many of the leading on-demand infrastructure experts, IT industry execs and commentators on about the “The Shape of the Cloud To Come.” The follow excerpts came from the interview:

• “Improved understanding of process and governance risk will shift the preferences of IT owners and regulators away from the cost and inconsistency of on-premise IT, and toward the auditable and highly professional security practices of cloud-service providers.” – Peter Coffee, director, Platform Research, Salesforce.com
• “Cloud Computing will certainly fuel the SaaS business. More and more Desktop applications will turn into Services or at least hybrid online/offline apps that live in the Cloud. Developers can rely on Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, and concentrate on building more sophisticated and powerful network-centric applications.” – Markus Klems, research assistant, FZI Research Center for Information Technology

The Collective (a blog about ‘higher intelligence’) explains that if we plan on getting to a zero footprint of IT assets, cloud technology definitely seems to have the best chances to get us there; but that would also assume we are talking public cloud technology, and not private. They say that for the time being, many may choose to attempt a hybrid cloud in order to help bridge the gap.

In the words of The Collective, the clock is ticking, so people need to get moving if we are going to meet a 2012 time frame.