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10 Feb 2010
Comments:1
Gartner recently claimed that by 2012 some 20 per cent of businesses will own no IT assets. This is actually not difficult to imagine. Organisations are already buying software and storage on demand, leaving its management to a third party.
It is fiscally convenient and spares them from the responsibility of managing something that is not core to the business.
The technology cycle is speeding up, making updating or replacing hardware and software more business-critical and costly. So it is not too far-fetched to imagine that eventually all business hardware and software will be leased rather than owned.
In the first 20 years, mobile phones changed in shape and size only – all doing the same thing, making and receiving voice calls.
When SMS was added, it could often be supported on older machines. You could have the same mobile phone for a decade and barely notice the difference. When mobiles started to evolve faster, involving an increasingly diverse range of features and functions, leasing made more sense.
The same happens with cars, where it has become reasonable to pay for a service that provides cars to a company, substitutes them as soon as faults appear, and handles the maintenance.
Just as with mobile phones and cars, many organisations will see ownership of their hardware as "non-strategic", as they define it.
However, in the past, there have been attempts to move to a leased IT model which in the end proved unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, with organisations focusing more on efficiency and moving IT spending into operational rather than capital expenditure, it seems they could now be looking more favourably on delegating the management of IT assets and services.
Richard Forkan is director at Plan-Net
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Do you agree?
Gartner needs to be more realistic
There may be a move in this direction but it seems unrealistic to expect that 20% of businesses will have NO IT assets in two years time.
The claim makes a great headline but really...does it feel reasonable? Of course it doesn't.
Posted by David R | 10 Feb 2010
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