Editorial by Steve Brown, Managing Director Highlander I.T. & Telecoms

With the passing of Steve Jobs, Cloud Computing speculation, the continued uncertainty in the global economy, social networking ups and downs and, in the final quarter, a big buzz about ‘consumerisation’; it has been another surprising and fast changing year for the I.T. industry.

Technologies in the year have undergone some of the biggest changes that we, as a company with nearly twenty years’ experience, have seen.  A major contributor to this is the emergence of ‘cloud computing’.  Cloud is the use of resources accessed via the internet to deliver services on demand.  For the majority of SME’s this would mean replacing dedicated servers physically hosted within the companies offices, with a connection from PC systems to services hosted in ‘the cloud’.

Currently demand is low for this, and will continue to remain so in the short term until return on investment and reliability is improved, however it seems certain that Cloud Computing will only increase over the next decade.

‘Consumerisation’ and the ‘Prosumer’ are words that relate to how I.T. consumption has changed.  No longer do we go to work and use high value and high performance systems, whilst at home we put up with outdated and sluggish equipment. Our home technology now often outperforms, outnumbers and out costs more than its office equivalents these days! Employees purchase their own laptops, iPads, Blackberry’s and we simply configure them to a network… this comes with many pro’s and con’s but it is happening more and will continue to do so. Security for companies must be top of the agenda when this is the case.

As well as employees wanting to use their own faster and sleeker home equipment, they also now want to use their social networks in a work environment.   Frowned upon by most years ago but today MSN, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more are all commonplace in many organisations.  Again all have positives and negatives and all must be managed effectively.

What will 2012 bring for the industry as a whole? Indications at our business are that organisations are finally starting to spend on the infrastructure upgrades that they postponed when the first signs of recession hit.  Reliance on I.T. to give greater business efficiencies and power the management information and customer relationship systems that most modern companies rely upon should give the industry another steady, but far from outstanding, year.

For the full Sheffield Star Industrial Survey 2012 - click on the picture below.