Research firm IDC is bullish when it comes to assessing future sales of IT, estimating that worldwide spending will grow 6.9 percent year over year to $1.8tr in 2012. A healthy chunk of spending - as much as 20 percent, IDC says - will be driven by a handful of technologies that are reshaping the IT industry: smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking and big data analytics.
Mobility is introducing significant management and security headaches for IT, while at the same time enabling the business to increase employee productivity and improve customer service. Social networking is spawning a treasure trove of customer data, but also creating an enormous challenge for companies that want to make any sense of all that data.
As companies try to balance the technical challenges and opportunities, they're also grappling with a shortage of skilled professionals. IT pros with application development, virtualization or cloud computing skills are in short supply, as are those with business analytics expertise.
