Review of 2009
Last year I predicted that the economy would continue to be challenging throughout 2009. While it was indeed a challenging year, we were surprised by how much IT spending actually took place. Whether they were taking advantage of the great deals that I had correctly predicted or just taking advantage of timing issues by focusing on IT when they weren’t scrambling to deal with layoffs or other company-wide issues, folks were hunkering down and getting their IT projects done.

In fact, here at Coyote Creek we were surprisingly (and thankfully) busy throughout the year. Although we had anticipated a fairly soft demand for projects, this wasn’t the case.

Last year I predicted that investments in the “hot topic” items of cloud computing, Web 2.0, and unified communications would slow; virtualization and collaboration tools would increase in popularity; and IT suppliers would be cutting some great deals. It seems that I was right on the money across the board.

As predicted, not a lot got done in the area of cloud computing (there’s a lot of interest and discussion here, but folks are still in the information gathering stages), we saw very little activity in the unified communications arena and virtually nothing in Web 2.0. At this point I believe that “Web 2.0” as a term is nearly dead. Instead, people are talking about “collaboration.” This past year we saw a lot of organizations developing collaboration tools, such as WiKis, blogs, and instant messaging capabilities, and there was also continued strong demand in the virtualization market.

Predictions for 2010
My last set of predictions were quite accurate. Here’s what I’m seeing for next year…

• We’ll Have A Soft Recovery
  I believe that the economy will perk up a little in 2010, although with today’s economic news alternating between positive and negative on practically a daily basis, I think this recovery will probably be a fairly bumpy ride. While some Fortune 500 companies will see single digit growth, we will not necessarily see widespread prosperity. Overall I anticipate a fairly soft recovery.
• Economic Cycles Will Shorten
  Looking beyond 2010, I also predict that a new trend for the 21st century will be a shortening of the traditional “boom and bust” economic cycle. I expect to see just 2 to 3 years between recessions. As the cycle shortens this also means that the depth and height of the boom and bust are likely to be smaller. So while I expect another recession to be just around the corner, I don’t expect it to be nearly as severe as this one.
• There’ll Be A Big Emphasis on Outsourcing
  As companies begin to grow again I predict that outsourcing will be on the “top 5” list of most CIOs. Why? Because after their experiences with this recession, people are going to be fairly cautious about building back inflexible resources. Organizations will be taking a close look at what they want to do themselves versus what they want someone else to handle, either by running it for them or by delivering it as a service.
  
  CIOs will be asking whether it would be best to have someone else operate and manage their network infrastructure or data center. They’ll be considering using hosted applications or software as a service. And they’ll be contemplating moving things into the cloud. In fact, one of the key charms of the cloud is its flexibility – you can turn it on and off as needed, just paying as you go. In an uncertain economy the idea that you can stop paying for IT resources can be very attractive!
  
  At the end of the day, however, it’s still all about services levels, availability, etc. – as always, someone has to effectively operate the computers and run the infrastructure. This hasn’t changed. Whether you run things internally or outsource to someone else, you still need discipline, and you still need to have good processes in place.
• The Problems with the Cloud Will Start to Emerge
  By the end of 2010 I anticipate that “cloud” will start to die out as a trendy term. After all, IT trends tend to last only about 18 months – it seems that we’re more driven by fashion and fad than the garment industry! Within the next 12 months people will figure out what they can and can’t do in the cloud, and the potential pitfalls of cloud computing will become more apparent.
  
  Right now both cloud computing and software as a service are both so new that most organizations have not yet experienced the dramatic outages. But 2009’s Google email outages were just the beginning. I predict that there will be more outages and service failures in the cloud, these will be fairly big and dramatic, and the press will be all over this topic.
  
  The awareness of these outages and failures will make people start to rethink and focus more on their due diligence. While I believe that cloud computing does have a place, it’s certainly not a panacea – none of this stuff is. Outsourcing to the cloud is no guarantee that things won’t or can’t go wrong!

All told, I anticipate that 2010 will be an interesting year.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact us when you need help deploying, optimizing, fixing or upgrading your enterprise IT infrastructure.

Happy holidays and best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous new year from all of us at Coyote Creek Consulting.

Best wishes,

Mike Faster
President

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