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The continued convergence of technologies for security, information management and compliance will make possible a new level of automation for IT - and organisations will be looking to IT to guide them through the process.
There has been a constant stream of change in virtualisation technologies over the past two years.
The first wave of virtualisation focused on specific platforms and hardware such as storage, servers, networks, and desktops. As virtualisation becomes commoditised, the next wave of this technology will change the way software is delivered, managed and consumed at the endpoint, thereby improving user productivity while reducing IT complexity.
Businesses need to use virtualisation to separate out valuable information, manage it easily, protect it completely and control it automatically.
In the last two years there has been a massive information explosion.
Today organisations are dealing with petabytes of data - and the amount is growing. The amount of stored information is growing at 50 percent a year.
Information is as distributed and mobile as today's workforce. It lives in hard-to-protect unstructured formats - e-mail, spreadsheets, and instant messages.
The country that produces the best equipped talent pool to work in the global economy will receive the cream of the world's work.
Around the world we are seeing a change - economic growth is being accompanied by a growing role for services and knowledge-based industries.
In Australia, with unemployment at a record 33 year low, and predictions that skills shortages will run to half a million people by 2020, we will need to access high value, competitive skills from beyond our borders.
This year IBM released the findings of its Global CEO Study which surveys over 1300 CEOs worldwide. The CEOs interviewed from Australia and New Zealand highlighted people skills as the greatest external force impacting their business in the next three years.
We are also dealing with the emergence of the globally integrated enterprise which is allowing work to be done from anywhere, and more importantly, where the skills are available.
And the world is getting more competitive. The globally integrated economy is going to increase competition particularly in services, which underpin our economy. And much of this competition will come from increasingly skilled labour forces in places like China and India.
"A person's passion for using their talents is the power source that drives an organisation" (Dr Carlos A. Raimundo).
A recent Gallup study suggested that approximately 74% of all employees are either "unengaged or actively disengaged."
Assuming the statistics are correct, that means the average business organisation is operating with a loss of about one third of its potential effectiveness.
That's not taking into account the cost of missed business opportunities or lost customers, and certainly doesn't include the cost of sabotage and other acts of revenge disengaged employees might undertake to "get even" with an organization.
According to Dr Carlos A. Raimundo, psychiatrist, MBA and researcher in behavioural modification and neurophysiology, even the most reliable employees, if not truly engaged, can become robots.
"A robot is someone who maintains the cultural standard without adding ‘new life'," he said at a recent Ten Minutes to Clarity workshop. "Every human needs to know he or she is making a difference; contributing something unique which ultimately inspires new style and growth."
In the past, IT departments never saw the power bill - all this has now changed, and well-proven technologies are being marshalled to address the issue of cost and carbon.
Australian businesses are a pragmatic lot. They are focused on either making money or saving money - and always doing what they can with what they have.
The Green push of late tends to manifest itself for Australian businesses in the practicalities of a) running out of power b) running out of space and c) recognising the cost of power from a dollar and carbon perspective.
IT Storage consumes over 30% of the power required in a typical data centre, and is the fastest growing IT infrastructure element as our world thrives on data. This puts it right into the cross-hairs of consideration when discussing power consumption and carbon overhead.
In the last 18 months, I have seen a distinct shift in customer thinking and focus around technologies that can provide tangible cost savings in these areas. For example, the use of "thin provisioning" to reduce physical storage consumption has become a mandatory requirement for new storage footprint.
Rather than struggling against government regulation, businesses should be looking for opportunities to use it to their advantage.
The relationship between government and business is often fraught, confrontational and difficult to manage. Government regulation, in theory designed to ensure the smooth operation of our economy and society, is often seen as an impediment by businesses keen to progress its interests on its own terms.
But after years working in both the public and private arena I am convinced it doesn't need to be this way.
Rather than struggling against government regulation, businesses should be looking for opportunities to use it to their advantage. Rather than see regulation as something which needs to be avoided, business should be looking to engage with government and move the debate in a direction which would be more beneficial to their own operations.
The problem with simply attacking and fighting against regulation, is that we eventually reach a point where there is no regulation and therefore no checks and balances in place to prevent a market overheating, or adopting deleterious practices.
We need a set of legislative changes and incentives to encourage investments into R&D and early stage start-ups, so that Australia too can claim a multinational like Nokia, CheckPoint or Google.
There's definitely something to be said for finally having a minister dedicated to the areas or research development and innovation in the Federal Government. And certainly when I met with Senator Kim Carr together with a group of IT industry representatives a few months ago, he's making the right noises regarding the sorts of approaches which would lead to a more innovative economy.
What we need to see now is some action. Specifically we need the government to adopt legislation which encourages what might be termed a "virtuous circle of innovation" within the Australian economy.
We don't need a hand out, and we don't need any extra money. We need a series of approaches which encourage investors to put their money into enterprises which lead to the creation of intellectual property, which can go on to make money in the global economy.
