gartner

ORLANDO, Fla.--Information technology spending is set for a rebound, but not much of one, Gartner said Monday.

Globally, worldwide IT spending should grow 3.3 percent from 2009 to 2010, said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research, in a speech here at the Gartner Symposium. That puts it at about $3.3 trillion.

Even with Gartner's forecast, spending won't return to 2008 levels until 2012, he said. But purveyors of computing technology and services can be forgiven if they take some heart in the news given the gloomy climate.

"The IT market is exiting its worst year ever," Sondergaard said, with spending dropping a projected 5.2 percent from 2008 to 2009. More than half of IT budgets will be the same or smaller in 2010. … Read more

ORLANDO, Fla.--OK, IT managers, it's time to loosen up.

That's how analysts advised Gartner Symposium attendees here Monday, arguing that corporate computing departments shouldn't block social networking and that security shouldn't completely lock down communications with the outside world. And even if information technology authorities want to shut down such activity, they can't.

"Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile," said Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president. "The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected."

The advice reflects the transformation of the information technology world as the Internet steadily pervades more and more corners of everybody's life. Although the Gartner event historically has concerned itself with matters such as justifying the expense of a new enterprise resource management computing system, the broadening show reflects the growing scope of work that IT managers face.

Overall, companies must acknowledge that not everything is under control of their own top-down administration, said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner.

"We're moving from control to greater autonomy," Sondergaard said. Managers also must find an appropriate place on the spectrums of in here vs. out there and owned vs. shared. … Read more

Amazon announced same-day delivery for certain areas today, although we're not sure if you can buy wines by the glass. We also cover the BlackBerry Storm and the Motorola Cliq announcements. Guess which one we like better? And the Danger Sidekick tale continues.

Don’t change your Twitter passwords if you don’t want to lose your account http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/twitter-warns-users-not-change-log-in-data-until-further-notice-815

Microsoft confirms data recovery for Sidekick users http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-15sidekick.mspx … Read more

The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver.

Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.

Google, Red Hat, and a wide variety of other businesses have all discovered this. So has Nokia, as Glyn Moody writes:

...Once (Sebastian Nyström, vice president of application and service frameworks in Nokia's Devices unit) laid out the logic of moving to open source, … Read more

The electronics industry is still hurting, but better times could be here before you know it.

Research firm Gartner says it has spotted a recovery already percolating for the sectors including PCs and mobile phones, with a sustained recovery pattern likely to take shape in 2010. What's holding back the optimism for a faster rebound this year, according to Gartner, is continuing uncertainty about the economy as a whole and, more specifically, about the effectiveness of government stimulus plans, especially when the stimulus runs out.

Gartner's forecast on the electronics industry was compiled for a report called "… Read more

If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies … Read more

Despite earlier, more dire predictions, PC sales are now estimated to fall off just 2 percent from 2008 totals, according to a report released Wednesday.

The latest forecast issued from market research firm Gartner says PC shipments should reach 285 million units by the end of 2009. That's just slightly off last year's shipments of 291 million. The forecast is markedly improved over June's estimates from Gartner, which forecast a 6 percent decline for the year.

The better-than-anticipated demand is being driven mostly by notebook and Netbooks in China and the U.S., according to Gartner research … Read more

A large percentage of IT projects fail, and one big reason is the nature of the traditional software acquisition process. Buyers typically purchase software based on faith (demoware), with acceptance periods built into contracts to provide escape clauses if the software doesn't work as advertised. Open-source software, however, with its "try-before-you-buy" option, provides a better way to increase the odds of a successful IT project, while simultaneously lowering costs.

Enterprise software is hard, and made doubly so when million-dollar decisions must be made about software that has not been tried beyond a sales engineer's slideshow. It'… Read more

The European Commission's decision to further probe Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems has raised both questions and speculation.

Oracle said in April that it would acquire Sun, a server maker and software company whose assets include the open-source MySQL database. The deal has been approved by the U.S. Justice Department and by Sun's shareholders.

But the European Commission, the regulatory arm of the European Union, announced last week that it was opening an in-depth investigation into the $7.4 billion planned takeover, saying that a preliminary probe raised the specter of threats to competition in the … Read more