Gartner looks into its IT crystal ball

Gartner looked into its crystal ball for this year and found plenty of changes coming in IT. The world is changing pretty fast and this will mean smaller tools to do the job and new directions for both ideas for technology. Here's a few of them:

• Apple will double its U.S. and Western Europe marketshare in computers by 2011.
• Half of all traveling workers will leave their notebook computers at home in favor of other devices. Even though notebooks continue to shrink in size and weight, travelers will lament the weight and inconvenience, the firm predicts.
• By next year, one-third of IT organizations will have at least one environmental requirement in their top buying rules.
• By 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include some elements of open-source technology.
• Also by 2012, one-third of business-application software spending will be on service subscriptions instead of product licenses.

For the CIO, this means plenty of changes. It means your operational budget could decline, and you will need a workforce trained for this new day. Are you ready for all this? And do you realize that tomorrow will be far different than today? Even some of these changes could mean major savings. But we predict that other costs will continue to rise, and that means that every CIO will have a tough balancing act to stay within the budget and keep their systems running.

For more on Gartner's predictions:
- See this CIO-Today article