Ed's Crystal Ball...

I managed to keep my Crystal Ball contained at the January Unplugged event. However I feel honour bound to uncover it, so here goes...

I managed to keep my Crystal Ball contained at the January Unplugged event. However I feel honour bound to uncover it. These are my views on what will happen in the IT industry after some deep thought, personal experience and through talking to people. Please do feel free to challenge...., but not too hard as I am a sensitive soul...!!

1) There will be a slow down due to "recession" style worries, although I am unsure whether we will actually go into a mainstream recession. However I do think customers will hold back on decisions. I have already heard of projects being cancelled in this and other industries.

2) I believe that customers will concentrate on their fundemental IT ie infrastructure. This starts with their servers, email etc. Linked to this I think there are "infrastructure" type technologies that they have bought into which they will want to leverage as much as possible. A clear example of this is "Sharepoint" with WSS coming free on Windows Server 2003.. and yes you have to pay when you scale to MOSS 2007 (.. Steve EJ is the expert here though..) . Another example of the databases etc ie MSSQL, Oracle etc.

3) I think customers will become more choosy about their suppliers, and will look at more cost effective suppliers.... smaller and more agile suppliers such as ourselves. There is clear opportunity for our membership here.

4) The more dynamic customers may look to technology to cut their running costs.

5) Customers will be forced into implementing certain IT solutions such as workflow to meet compliance standards.

6) Mobile technologies will be used more.

7) Social Communities will be more important ie Facebook, Bebo etc... Need to understand more clearly the impact of this.

8) It will be ever more important to have unique selling points...

9) Long term contracts will continue as before with more stable behaviour within the public sector.

So "Where there are problems there are opportunities" for the lean, mean and innovative companies that make up the UKITA membership....
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