In the troubled world of IT budgets, it looks as though the sun may
slowly be coming out again. According to
figures from Gartner, IT
spending will grow by 5.3% in 2010, raising worldwide technology
investments to $3.4 trillion from $3.2 trillion last year. Moreover, it
thinks that next year, we will see another 4.2% increase. True, part of
this growth is down to a projected decline in the value of the dollar,
but even then, spending is still on the rise, compared to a 1.4% decline
in 2009.
What's interesting for those seeking jobs in the
IT sector is where the money is going. Computing hardware spend will
rise 5.7% this year, with storage growing the fastest. People are buying
PCs in far greater numbers, indicating that a technology refresh is
underway. But one interesting aspect of this increased hardware spend is
that although organisations will be buying more servers, they will be
concentrating on lower-end models. Gartner says that in the longer term,
capital expenditure on servers will be hindered by virtualisation,
consolidation "and, potentially, cloud computing". Software spending
will be at 5.1%, and the majority of enterprise software market will see
positive growth during this year. The biggest software segments through
2014? Virtualisation, security, and data integration.
This
should give us some useful signs about the areas to concentrate in as
we watch for the green shoots of recovery in the job market. Gartner's
own figures support this. In January, it said that by 2012, one in five
businesses will own no IT assets. That is a pretty ambitious figure, and
if true, shows just how many organisations are embracing the concept.
In that time frame, it also says India-centric IT services companies
will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market. That
rather dampens its prediction - which would otherwise have been nothing
but good news for UK IT shops - that IT services investment will grow by
5.7%.
For many enterprises,
cloud computing won't
necessarily mean running everything on the Internet. Many organisations
will begin with their own private cloud infrastructures, taking full
advantage of virtualised hardware, and increasingly sophisticated tools
to optimise the use of that hardware. Virtualisation companies are
increasingly interested in developing a stack of products that can be
used to more efficiently manage virtualised environments. Companies such
as
VMware offer software that automatically patches virtual machines,
for example, and moves around between physical servers in the event of a
failure.
Cloud computing is likely to be a hot button for
IT jobs in the next few years. Understanding how to administer and
manage this software will put IT professionals at an advantage,
especially as more companies move into areas such as virtual desktop
integration. It will also require expertise in security, and networking.
These will be increasingly hot topics to watch in the coming years.
