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Rebecca Thomson
Thursday 04 February 2010 15:52
Cloud computing and social computing will be major issues for CIOs in 2010, with
businesses set to relinquish control over some parts of their IT estate as the trends take
hold, according to analyst group Gartner.
Speaking at the Intellect Regent Conference on technology and the economy, Prentice
said technology "is not the silver bullet" that will bring the UK out of recession, but that
the industry will continue to thrive this year as long it keeps in mind what customers
want from IT. "Technology succeeds when it meets a need that people care about," he
said.
While cloud computing is going to start taking a real hold in 2010 and 2011, Prentice
said that it needs to be carefully planned. "Throwing technology at things does not solve
problems."
He predicted that a fifth of businesses are likely to get rid of their IT infrastructure. "Not
large businesses with data centres, but small and medium companies and start-ups.
Why build a data centre when you could have access to someone else's?" Cloud
computing may not be a new idea, but commentators say 2010 will be a turning point for
the technology.
The details of how the environment will affect IT are still unclear, but Prentice predicted
that by 2014 most IT business plans will have reference to the carbon dioxide produced
by a project, and environmental concerns will be raised more often.
Prentice expects the contextual data around someone's use of a mobile phone to be as
influential to mobile services as search currently is to the web by 2015.