The year 2012 is surrounded in a shroud of mystery, with many believing that some sort of cataclysmic or transformative event will take place December 21st or 23rd of that year. Predictions of impending doom stem from interpretations made about the Mayan and other ancient civilizations and the Long Count calendar which is said to "end" sometime around that same date in 2012.
IT folks aren't strangers from thinking about facing doom and gloom in the future. While we may not be following the Mayan calendar at work, our own calendar has certainly put misplaced fear in many of our hearts. Remember the "Year 2000" problem or Y2K? I for one was certainly glad the Millennium Bug didn't end my career like it was supposed to.
But Gartner recently announced a bit of prognostication that got me thinking. Yesterday, the analyst firm launched their 2010 and beyond predictions which spanned some 56 markets, topics and industry areas, with around 250 predictions in total.
The one that quickly caught my eye stated: "By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets."
What? No IT assets in one out of every five companies in as little as two years from now? Wow! That's a pretty powerful statement and quite a bold prediction.
Gartner says this will be the result of virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees bringing in their own desktops and notebooks to work.
Gartner writes, "The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points."
This prediction is not entirely a surprise, however; as we have witnessed this change happen over the last seven years to hosted Websites and e-mail. Most companies are using outside providers for these types of services today rather than burdening their internal IT staff.
Virtualization has definitely done its part thus far in shrinking down the data center footprint of server equipment. But this latest prediction has one in five companies with a zero footprint - NO IT assets!!! That seems like an awfully heavy burden to place on the cloud community. It means that cloud technology will need to mature a lot faster than has virtualization in order to reach those goals.
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. In the interim, many may choose to attempt a hybrid cloud in order to help bridge the gap. But the clock is ticking, so people need to get moving if we are going to meet a 2012 time frame.
As we enter 2010, 2012 no longer seems to be that far off into the future. So if you live in the world of IT, make up your mind. Which will it be... the end of IT as we know it? Or will it be the end of the world itself? I saw the movie... so I'm voting that we change IT if we have to!