Within the next 10 years chief information officers and IT directors will have the upper hand when buying new IT systems, analyst Gartner has predicted.
Enough is enough. Since I've been writing about the IT industry, suppliers have spent loads of money marketing their products, selling snake oil which locks users into a proprietary upgrade path that only favours the supplier.
IT directors have far more flexibility today, thanks to the growth of software as a service, offshore outsourcing, cloud computing and the service oriented architecture. I say, it's about time. And if Gartner is right, the industry will hopefully develop products which address the genuine concerns of users: supporting new business opportunities while maintaining complex heterogeneous IT systems that need to communicate seamlessly.
