20% of firms will own no IT assets by 2012

A fifth of enterprises will hold no IT assets by 2012 as cloud computing and mobile working practices become commonplace, Gartner predicts (reports Information Age).

Technologies such as ‘cloud computing’ and virtualisation within the enterprise will result in a fifth of businesses owning no IT assets whatsoever by 2012, says Gartner research, with more and more firms using third parties to manage data and services, and with employees using their own laptops or smartphones for work purposes. This, Gartner forecasts, will mean scaling back or reallocation of enterprise IT budgets, while vendors will be forced to reconsider their own strategies.

Of course, this trend has already been under way in some firms in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry – which, more than most industry sectors, is highly fragmented and reliant upon having a large proportion of mobile workers. As a result, construction was among the early adopters of mobile telephones, its use of laptops is high, and it has also been a successful market for some software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications – notably construction collaboration platforms. As SaaS has become more and more commonplace, early reservations about the wisdom of holding data and applications ‘in the cloud’ have been eroded, and the focus is often more about which solution to use rather than ‘in-house or web-based?’. Indeed, this experience of SaaS even encouraged some AEC businesses – like Taylor Woodrow (post) 18 months ago – to go a stage further and opt for cloud-hosted office applications.

There also appears to be an inference in Gartner’s forecasts that vendors who are targeting enterprises to sell enterprise-class, in-house solutions will find it increasingly difficult. Instead it 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. However, 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 materialise across the AEC sector.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/01/20-of-firms-will-own-no-it-assets-by-2012/

2 comments

    • Dave Ault on 22 January 2010 at 11:08 am

    No one I know can say the examples of management by MBA CPA wisdom has resulted in sound policies in any industry I can think of. 20% may very well try to implement this cloud stuff with an eye on immediate budget “savings” as they write themselves another 30% bonus for work well done. But the truth will come out as the cloud loses the critical data needed for the company to run to hackers and cost cutting MBA CPA types at the cloud companies that cut to many corners seting up their latest cash cow. The web is insecure and unreliable now and will be forever. Lets face it, as attacking the web is now a weapon of foreign governments to inflict damage on their opponents of which we are one how can any thinking individual really trust the cloud to be secure with critical data? Perhaps a perusal of news lately would show the benign effect of economic sabatoge by the Chinese and the Russian mobs for instance. Life Lock anyone?

  1. I, like many in the Industry find this timescale pretty fanciful. This isn’t because there will be insufficient variety of “aaSes” on the market to satisfy demand, every day new ventures are being released or rebranded as Cloud offerings. Nor do I believe that the “under-whelmed users” will stop the migration.
    No. The reason I don’t believe this will come to pass has nothing to do with the future and everything to do with the past
    Very few organisations are without the suite of servers that sit in the corner running old legacy applications for the event of users needing to get hold of historic data. The fact that some cannot even be connected to the internet rules out running the systems in cloud and for those that can even if a service provider was prepared to provide the skills and hardware, the setup costs would be so prohibitive to the value of the data that the business case wont stack up.
    full comments at http://ping.fm/aG0hD

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