Angelbeat recently completed its annual “clean slate” survey, where our community of 200,000+ IT Professionals was asked what they would do differently if they could (re)build their entire network/data center infrastructure from scratch. 71% said that they would never buy a PC, desktop phone, server, etc. Thin clients and BYOD tablets/laptops only, with a bluetooth earpiece for telephone calls and a large display monitor at each desk to reduce eye strain. Last year the figure was 44% – even I was amazed at this rapid adoption of cloud architecture.
On a related note 93% indicated wireless would be the only network. No wired backup, no cabling, no face plates, no UPS, battery backup, power management, etc. Last year only 57% of respondents had this same level of confidence in wi-fi, a huge increase.
So what does this mean to the IT Pro? 2013/2014 spending will focus on middleware, virtualization/thin clients, cloud security, hosted application delivery, application architecture, etc. – anything but hardware and physical devices. So make sure that your job responsibilities fall into these growth areas.