Analysis monolith Gartner believes that one in five companies will close their IT departments by 2012 as the trend toward cloud computing takes hold. What they overlook of course is that the corporate management at those 20% of companies would presumably have to pay attention to, and endeavour to understand, whatever the hell it is that IT does… and very soon. Cutting IT staffers might be appealing to the bean-counters, but to be replaced with a cloud? Many still struggle with the concept of a web for pity’s sake.
For better or worse, Gartner is well respected and intently listened to, and much of its remaining ‘cloud impact’ argument seems logical. IT hardware won’t need looking after in enterprise scale environments, instead they will be tended to on massive hosted IT farms. Procurement, management and development of specific technologies will all be taken away.
As a piece of futurology, we think Gartner’s prediction holds water, but this is surely not going to take such a radical hold by 2012? More a case of “maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of IT professionals’ careers…”
In such a world, IT skills would remain in high demand and the prospect of drowning in IT operations sludge would well and truly become a relic. More time for IT innovation – isn’t that what we all want?
