By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets

By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets

Market Implications:

While the need for computing hardware will not go away, the shift of actual ownership of it will reverberate throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.

— For example, enterprise IT budgets either will shrink or—in more enlightened organizations—

be re-allocated to more strategic projects. IT staffers, and hardware specialists in particular, will face layoffs or will need to be retrained to meet other requirements. Laid-off hardware specialists find themselves chasing a declining job pool.

Hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points such as cloud services providers, vertical application value-added retailers (VARs), server farm maintenance organizations as well as end users for PCs, notebooks and handheld communications devices. This, in turn, will mean that hardware OEM sales strategies must adapt to meet the requirements of the new buyers.

Enterprise sales of servers will become a shrinking part of overall share.

Low-margin, bare metal sales will increase.

Turn-key solutions will become increasingly important for traditional enterprise customers.

PC sales will shift toward end-user, personal buyers. The employee purchases may be out-of-pocket from consumer channels or from employer-subsidized plans.