AIIA Industry Analyst Forum, Future Trends

10 May 2007 AIIA Industry Analyst Forum, Future Trends

I attended a very interesting conference this week (although maybe not as fancy as Java One!) with three excellent important speakers, namely Andy Rowsell-Jones (Gartner), Catherin Bennett (IDC) , Sam Higgins (Longhaus)

Gartner
Survey of CIOs :

• 63% they will grow faster than the market, ie increase their market share
• 62% believe they have the right funds
• 29% believe they have the right skills

However the skills that are needed arent just hard core tech skills. Its the IT specialist who also has the whole rounded skill set, project management, analysis, customer relations etc that are required (and these people take 10-15 years to become skilled so there are no obvious solutions – 457 Visas over the last 3 mths are greater than the total for the last 3 years to try and pull in the right people from abroad!). Improvement of business practices is a key area of growth for IT systems, particularly systems that can give upto date complete snapshots across organisation

Overall though – its the “McDonaldisation” of the IT industry that is happening and those companies that adapt will be the ones that survive and grow. IT Components need to be simplified (from an external point of view) with ease of install, and short learning curve needed. Provide systems that mean that less skilled staff can do the same job…

IDC Australia

• Predicted Growth of sectors : SOA (+22%), VOIP (+39%), Virtualisation (+32%), Document Management (+51%)
• Role of the CIO is expanding across organisation, many CIOs are now reporting directly to CEO rather than CFO
• Automate business processes, but then be able to jump to scalable, repeatable and consistent systems
• 50% of CIOs have to demonstrate ROI < 24mths (out from 12mths last year)
• IT Projects still take too long! Need to speed up!
• IT Spend is 80/20 Operations/Innovation
• Large increase in IT budgets, 5.9% this year
• Recruiting, training and retaining senior IT staff very difficult in current environment
• Sales staff should be providing a “Business Case” for their product to CIOs
• And the best one, 50% of all IT projects still fail!!!

Longhaus

• SOA is inevitable. There is no choice as with latest upgrades of Office and SAP you immediately have SOA systems.
  The challenge is now managing those systems
• Open Source is now a mature market
  –Main sign being consolidation e.g. Redhat & JBoss, Novell and Microsoft agreement
  –$2.6 billion invested in open source since 1995
  –Paying for support is now the norm.
  –IBM have 7,000 dedicated Open Source developers and Oracle supposedly 9,000
  –However, local support is a real challenge and there is a growing market

Panel Discussions

• Multisourcing from vendors is the main model rather than outsourcing all of IT to a single shop
• Wage inflation of 30% a year in India is effecting reasons for offshoring
• Key players are lagging behind the Web2.0 wave in Australia. Blogs, Wiki’s etc are now the norm
• OpenSource is a really big player in the market, and companies that can support opensource products locally are doing well.
• Back to the skills shortages. Rounded IT professionals and Enterprise Architects becoming very valuable.

Overall
This was an excellent conference that I’d strongly recommend for people in the future, and for me showed that Shine are definately going in the right direction : from providing products in the Energy space that provide high level decision makers with correct information, supporting and investment in OpenSource training and products, and most importantly in providing IT consultants that are far more than just coders!