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Say what you will about the effectiveness of the Dodd-Frank legislation and all the new regulations the law ushers in. One thing is becoming clear: it's going to be a benefit to the IT and consulting industries just as Sarbanes-Oxley was. According to the magazine Wall Street Technology, capital markets firms are expected to spend some $44 billion on IT in 2011 and a large part of this 6% increase over 2010 is due to Dodd-Frank. These companies are looking to put systems in place to enforce compliance and implement controls. Even as interpretation of the regulations continues to evolve, the companies know they need to begin ramping up their IT efforts. Furthermore, many companies are more focused on risk management than they ever used to be as a result of having the fear of God, so to speak, instilled in them during the Great Financial Crisis. So there are some IT professionals who will be hired as a result of this. But the greatest benefit will go to the consulting and audit...

A big part of overall technology industry profit is driven by spending in the Information Technology sector. Information Week recently released the results of a survey that provides a glimpse into 2011. The following chart summarizes the results of the survey: The good news is that a total of 55% of of the 552 respondents do expect to see budgets and spending rise next year. Last year the number was 45% so we see continued improvement. Only 19% expect to cut IT budgets compared to 24% of respondents in the previous survey. Finally, 26% expect to keep budgets flat compared to 30% previously. The biggest increase was seen in the group expecting to increase spending to rise 5% to 10% which went from 16% up to 27%. Supporting these budget expectations is the fact that 59% of respondents report growing demand for IT services at their companies. This next chart shows where IT investments are expected to be made: In general, every category is expected to see a modest increase. At the ...

Read an interesting article at ComputerWorld today that got me thinking. The title: "IT centralization is back in fashion." It is useful to think about what this means for IT organizations and the vendors that support them. Why centralize? With technology assets centralized in one place, it's easier to take advantage of opportunities for efficiency and streamlining such as virtualization, storage de-duplication, cloud computing and outsourcing, all of which promise to lower costs. Centralization also makes it easier to create an effective disaster recovery strategy, minimize labor redundancies (ie, reduce expensive IT staff), get volume discounts on technology purchases, and lower maintenance and training costs through standardization. Is the trend real? There's some statistical evidence of a tilt toward IT centralization. In Computerworld's recent Forecast survey, 37% of 312 respondents said it's likely that their IT units will become more central...

Much of the attention Monday was given to the announcement that Google was acquiring AdMob. This fits neatly and predictably into the search giant's strategy of dominating online advertising. What was not discussed as loudly is Google's relentless push into Microsoft's turf. Google is serious about gaining access to enterprise computing and the company recognizes where improvements need to be made. Google has been pushing a couple of initiatives targeted to the enterprise. One is their search appliance. The other is Google Apps. The Google Apps suite of applications includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. These tools are meant to support individual work and communication as well as collaboration. There has been some acceptance of these tools among corporations. At $50 per person per year, the Apps Premier product offering is clearly a cost effective alternative to the Microsoft Office suite of tools. The problem, however, has been s...

Gartner is hosting their Symposium/ITxpo 2008 conference in Orlando this week. From Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research, comes the money quote: "The next big thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk management and compliance" Garnter goes on to say that information technology spending could rise only 2.3 percent in 2009. Gartner had previously forecast 5.8 percent growth in IT spending next year. Developed economies are expected to get the worst of it, especially the United States and Western Europe, but emerging regions will not be immune either. For Europe, Gartner is now predicting a slowdown of 0.8% where it was previously looking for 2.3% growth. In North America, they are expecting growth to remain barely positive at a 0.5% rate, down from the previous prediction for 5.3% growth. Echoing some of the themes we previously wrote about in our post " 10 ways the financial meltdown impacts tech ", Gartner offers several recom...