Worth a read. Gartner’s IT predictions and trends….

• By 2015, a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.
  Online attacks can be multimodal, in the sense of targeting multiple systems for maximum impact, such as the financial system (the stock exchange), physical plant (the control systems of a chemical, nuclear or electric plant), or mobile communications (mobile-phone message routers). Such a multimodal attack can have lasting effects beyond a temporary disruption, in the same manner that the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. had repercussions that have lasted for nearly a decade. If a national stock market was rendered unavailable for several weeks, there would be lasting effects even if there was no change in government, although it is also possible that such disruptive actions could eventually result in a change in leadership.
• By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most new Global 2000 CIOs.
  Four initiatives — context-aware computing, IT’s direct involvement in enterprise innovation development efforts, Pattern-Based Strategies and harnessing the power of social networks — can potentially directly increase enterprise revenue. Executive and board-level expectations for realizing revenue from those and other IT initiatives will become so common that, in 2015, the amount of new revenue generated from IT initiatives will become the primary factor determining the incentive portion of new Global 2000 CIOs’ annual compensation.
• By 2015, information-smart businesses will increase recognized IT spending per head by 60 percent.
  Those IT-enabled enterprises that successfully navigated the recent recession and return to growth will benefit from many internal and external dynamics. Consolidation, optimization and cost transparency programs have made decentralized IT investments more visible, increasing "recognized" IT spending. This, combined with staff reduction and freezes, will reward the leading companies within each industry segment with an IT productivity windfall that culminates in at least a 60 percent increase in the metric for "IT spending per enterprise employee" when compared against the metrics of peer organizations and internal trending metrics.
• By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT services.
  As the IT services industry matures, it will increasingly mirror other industries, such as manufacturing, in transforming from a craftsmanship to a more industrialized model. Cloud computing will hasten the use of tools and automation in IT services as the new paradigm brings with it self-service, automated provisioning and metering, etc., to deliver industrialized services with the potential to transform the industry from a high-touch custom environment to one characterized by automated delivery of IT services. Productivity levels for service providers will increase, leading to reductions in their costs of delivery.
• By 2015, 20 percent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
  The move by non-IT organizations to provide non-IT capabilities via cloud computing will further expand the role of IT decision making outside the IT organization. This represents yet another opportunity for IT organizations to redefine their value proposition as service enablers — with either consumption or provision of cloud-based services. As non-IT players externalize core competencies via the cloud, they will be interjecting themselves into value chain systems and competing directly with IT organizations that have traditionally served in this capacity.
• By 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
  The trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already under way in many organizations and will become commonplace within four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees — i.e., individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. IT is set to enter the next phase of the consumerization trend, in which the attention of users and IT organizations shifts from devices, infrastructure and applications to information and interaction with peers. This change in view will herald the start of the postconsumerization era.
• By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
  The Apple iPad is the first of what promises to be a huge wave of media tablets focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation, with fewer features and less processing power than traditional PCs and notebooks or pen-centric tablet PCs. Support requirements for media tablets will vary across and within enterprises depending on usage scenario. At minimum, in cases where employees are bringing their own devices for convenience, enterprises will have to offer appliance-level support with a limited level of network connectivity (which will likely include access to enterprise mail and calendaring) and help desk support for connectivity issues.
• By 2015, 10 percent of your online "friends" will be nonhuman.
  Social media strategy involves several steps: establishing a presence, listening to the conversation, speaking (articulating a message), and, ultimately, interacting in a two-way, fully engaged manner. Thus far, many organizations have established a presence, and are mostly projecting messages through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates that are often only an incremental step up from RSS feeds. By 2015, efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots — automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual.

Far too often the media a focused on a “winner takes all” mentality – it drives great headlines, like “iPhone killer”, but seldom reflects reality. As David Pogue says when reflecting on 10 years of writing the column:

Things don’t replace things; they just splinter. I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to keep hearing pundits say that some product is the “iPhone killer” or the “Kindle killer.” Listen, dudes: the history of consumer tech is branching, not replacing.

TV was supposed to kill radio. The DVD was supposed to kill the Cineplex. Instant coffee was supposed to replace fresh-brewed.

But here’s the thing: it never happens. You want to know what the future holds? O.K., here you go: there will be both iPhones and Android phones. There will be both satellite radio and AM/FM. There will be both printed books and e-books. Things don’t replace things; they just add on.

On Dell’s modular data centers…

Worth a scan.

Allows information to flow freely. Social apps are the transparency engines of the modern enterprise. That’s why apps like Chatter matter.

The real threat might come from below, as Benioff knows well. Upstarts Yammer and Jive Software are selling similar social networking tools for businesses. In only two years Yammer has lined up 1.5 million members, entirely by word of mouth. That’s three-quarters as many people as Salesforce has using its software, though there’s one, big difference: Anyone with a corporate e-mail address can sign up for Yammer, free, and connect with others in the same company. But if your IT or legal departments are concerned about having to archive those communications or beef up security, Yammer charges up to $5 a month per member; only 15% pay. But they include big names such as Pitney Bowes, Nationwide and AMD. "Salesforce will be a tab inside Yammer," boasts cofounder David Sacks.

Salesforce customers seem divided. "Chatter lets me see the whole, unvarnished picture," says Michael Dell. "It has dramatically increased my knowledge of what’s going on here." One big Salesforce customer is more hesitant. "Does every CEO really want to give every one of his employees that much visibility inside?" he asks. "It could backfire. There’s a fear of that rogue employee who uses the system to embarrass the company."

Benioff, of course, doesn’t view the world that way. "Salesforce is a culture of no secrets, and that includes me," he says. He believes transparency keeps his company in synch with customers and is one way to constantly poke the status quo. Using Chatter, he publishes his professional goals each quarter and expects others to do the same. Compensation is in part based on reaching those goals. He recently asked his nearly 5,000 Facebook friends to vote on two competing Salesforce advertisement mock-ups; theirs was the final call. Before Dreamforce, his big annual conference in December, Benioff spends weeks laboring over his speech, but the real test is when he has ten or so customers come in to critique a rehearsal over pizza and soda.

"Nothing is sacred," says Parker Harris, his buddy, cofounder and head of Salesforce technology. Case in point: The two clashed over Chatter, with Harris insisting it was merely a feature to tuck inside the core sales offering. On a flight back from a sales event in Las Vegas last year Harris showed Benioff an early version of the app. Benioff said it wasn’t enough, and Harris explained that other projects, including forecasting and calendar tools already in the works, would suffer. Benioff’s response: "Everything can’t be important."