David Cearley of Gartner is reporting that IT spending will rebound from 2009 levels in the coming year. However the increased spending will only recover about half of the 2009 decline. I think that the interesting thing is where that money is thought to be headed. Cloud computing is now number 1 on the list of “Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2010″.
Working with clients in 2009 is really the first year that most of my implementations found their way to virtualized servers for almost every tier of functionality. Gartner believes that the trend will continue for 2010, extending to HA (high availability) applications (bad day for Microsoft clustering?) and client applications. The push for virtualization is/was really a push to simplify the data center and consolidate on ESX, etc…
Similarly, Gartner is predicting that the coming year will see Cloud Computing become the central focus in many organizations. To be fair, Gartner is now combining Web-Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Mashups into the Cloud mix, which seems to say that clients will be working to create infrastructure that “can” run in the cloud if need be. My personal opinion is that new systems should be delivered to do just that, protect the clients’ ability to make hosting decisions in the future. In the past we had to worry about implementing systems with customization that could hinder efforts to upgrade underlying frameworks. Now we need to also protect the clients ability to re-locate the entire implementation.
