"We don't really buy hardware anymore,"

This quote from a Louisiana based healthcare staffing company. Five years ago, they would buy about 5,000 servers a year and now this year only bought one from HP. (see details in article below). This is a significant change that most IT workers out there had better listen to intently.

Who does this trend not effect? It does not effect the server makers as a total, since computing power is still going to be needed in the world. But it effects the data center workers who have just learned how to get everything working with their server farm. This will be a museum piece as more and more companies will put their workloads out to the cloud.

It is time for the IT department to start a plan to transition out of their blissful life of being the most powerful organization in the company to being an enabler of information flow with a budget of 50%.

CIOs who do not have a 5 year plan to decrease their budget by 50% and increase the IT functionality by 300% need to be replaced with those thinking outside of the box, who can efficiently meld the trends of this transition with the business needs of their company. This along with Big Data are going to be the greatest transitions we have seen in IT since the implementation of RDBMs. Like so many trends, many will be caught in the middle, unaware that things would change so quickly.

If there is anything we should learn from the trends of the past, everything will change much quicker than we thought it would. You can bet your career on it!