Neerav Bhatt, blogger, librarian, internet marketer

Towards the latter part of 2008 quite a few entrepreneurs, start-ups and business owners/consultants in the Australian ICT sector emerged from their offices and began to meet and socialise in person at events like Silicon Beach Australia Friday drinks, Pubcamp and Barcamp

My prediction based on recent discussions with people like @kcarruthers and blog posts like It feels like there's a community forming is that as a result there will be a lot more collaboration in the Australian IT industry, especially amongst small/medium-sized businesses.

Sarah Carter, FaceTime Communications

Collaboration will move towards the mainstream. Whether this is through enterprise collaboration tools such as Microsoft OCS, IBM Sametime or the Cisco Jabber/Webex toolset or through a combination of publicly available tools — from LinkedIn to Facebook, to Twitter, to Windows Live, Skype et al.

It will move towards the mainstream, as we all seek to consolidate. Whether that's our phone lines into VoIP, our staff numbers or consolidating security tools from multiple tools to lesser boxes at the gateway.

In seeking the economies that this collaboration and consolidation (save money, save time, save support costs) gives us, we'll actually end up working smarter and more effectively.

(My glass is definitely half full, not half empty!)

Paul Harapin, VMware A/NZ MD

With the focus on the economy moving into 2009, Australian organisations are looking to IT technologies that help do more with less. Anything that helps drive operational efficiency while significantly reducing capex and opex ... will be paramount.

[A large percentage] of organisations in Australia have or are in the process of implementing virtualisation solutions to achieve these business benefits. Additionally, we will see more organisations (currently 27 per cent locally) such as the Attorney General's Department and Suncorp, adopt "virtualisation first policies" to help drive longer term efficiencies into their IT infrastructure.

Green IT is still high on the radar, and as Australian organisations focus more on both the measurement and reporting aspects of carbon trading, they will begin to seriously investigate technologies that will allow them to reduce their carbon footprint and prepare for carbon emissions regulation in Australia.

We will see more organisations such as Darwin City Council, significantly reduce their carbon emission footprint through virtualisation. And lastly, social networking infrastructure will gain greater traction within organisations as a way to build culture and disseminate information both internally and externally.

Peter McAlpine, Adobe Australia MD

I felt there were two key predictions for the Australian ICT industry.

Firstly, the further development of rich internet applications and the cloud computing space — this also ties into the desktop application development, where AIR and Flex are key technologies.

Secondly, cost-effective digital marketing — in challenging economic times, getting the most from your marketing investments takes on new urgency for all businesses.

Driving sales, building customer engagement, and enhancing the perception of your brand are critical — and with shrinking budgets and smaller staffs, doing more with less is essential. Marketers will look to use tools that create once and deliver to any medium — print, web, video and mobile, as these offer dramatic productivity gains and deliver quantifiable ROI.

Rob Mackinnon, IBRS analyst

For the Chinese, 2009 is the Year of the Ox. How fitting that successful CIOs will be down to earth, practical and diligent in carrying out their duties in 2009. Two Ox-like characteristics will prevail:

• Caution: this will be particularly true in dealings with vendors. Whilst wholesale changes are unlikely to occur, CIOs will be extremely cautious in selecting new vendors and/or re-engaging existing vendors at renewal time. Why? Because seismic shifts are occurring in vendor-land. The Satyam scandal has triggered concerns about the true financial viability of sub-continent-based IT organisations. Nortel has been granted bankruptcy protection in Canada, its home base. Will Sun's decline reach its nadir in 2009?



Similarly, caution will prevail in launching new projects unless the benefits are blindingly obvious. Adopting new or emerging technologies will be similarly fraught. Thus, unified communications is likely to be marginalised in 2009 but server virtualisation will continue to prosper, provided the benefits can be 'banked'.

• Methodical and detail-oriented: in over 30 years of involvement with IT management, the current degree of scrutiny and control over IT budgets is totally unprecedented. Budget excesses overlooked in previous years will not be pardoned in 2009. Micro-management of IT capital and expense budgets will prevail. Early warning beacons will be put in place to contain blow-outs early and savvy CIOs will strengthen governance practises.

Paul Fitzgerald, GHS consulting director

I think the industry will do just fine if we ignore the media and politicians, and just get on with it ... I'm with Sarah ... glass half full!

Steve Hitchman, MIP MD

I believe that in 2009, due to new techniques and software, the cost of data warehousing and business intelligence will drop by at least 60-70 per cent in both time and money.

Warren Chaisatien, Telsyte research director

Telsyte's top 10 list for Australia's telecom market in 2009 is:

• Counter-cyclical telecom service providers to gain as the economy slows;
• Green telecom to remain top of mind, driven by cost savings, good corporate citizenship and the prospect of carbon trading;
• Rapid increase in business partner networks as the slowdown accelerates collaboration;
• Hosted unified communications (UC) to thrive, particularly among small and medium businesses;
• Mobility to become the next UC element, bridging back-office UC deployment with mobile line-of-business application roll-outs;
• Invasion of consumer applications in the enterprise, bringing powerful multimedia and social network capabilities to business;
• Contact centre functionality to become commonplace across the organisation;
• Year of mobile content fuelled by next-generation smartphones, dropping mobile data charges and user preference to go off deck;
• Birth of an advertising-subsidised mobile market, powered by location-based technology; and
• Ethernet over copper to emerge as ADSL2+ speeds stall and fibre remains absent on the horizon.

Tracey Fellows, Microsoft Australia MD

Cloud computing
This year, we will see much talked-about technology become a reality. There has been considerable hype around cloud computing, and in 2009 this will become a reality for businesses, as well as consumers that want to connect their personal, home and business lives no matter where they are.

One of the benefits of cloud computing is the ability for an organisation to move applications back and forth between its own servers and the cloud quickly and seamlessly, in order to reduce hardware costs, take full advantage of new capabilities and to meet changing capacity demands — all very relevant benefits in today's economic climate as well.

Later this year we will be launching Microsoft Online Services through Telstra's T-Suite. Instead of a business having to buy, install and maintain a computer server for messaging (email and calendar) and collaboration, these services will now be fully hosted by Telstra and Microsoft. Our new Windows 7 beta also makes it easier for consumers to manage devices and access their 'stuff' across multiple devices, and in any location, while Microsoft's Live Mesh enables consumers to access the most up-to-date version of their files on any device.

Education
In 2009, as debate around the Federal Government's $2 billion Digital Education Revolution continues, parents, teachers, students and the media will be engaged in discussion around the changing role and importance of technology in education. While there is a long way to go, we will begin to see in earnest the kind of pedagogical change in education that is necessary to ensure our children are well-equipped for the future.

'Staycations' and home entertainment
Another interesting trend we'll see in 2009 is people spending more nights in front of the box — and I'm not necessarily talking television. Tough economic times mean people may pull back on many luxuries, but spend more on goods that make the home a more enjoyable place. This is where webcams, entertainment-skewed PCs, and gaming products will continue to perform. We call this the idea of kitting out one's home, a 'staycation' (stay at home vacation).

Hard data speaks to this trend — Xbox 360 sales in Australia were the best ever over the 2008 Christmas period and we expect them to continue to grow in 2009.

Wendy Reid, EMC A/NZ marketing director

Improving efficiency will be one of the major objectives for businesses of all sizes in 2009. With the explosion of information set to continue, and organisations being under pressure to reduce spending, new ways will have to be found to do more with less.

In 2009, businesses will continue to look to virtualisation to simplify information management processes, while cloud-delivered applications will also present opportunities to lower operating costs and drive business efficiencies.

De-duplication technology will be another way businesses will enhance efficiency in 2009. If businesses reduce the amount of redundant data, their back-up environments will become faster and more secure, enabling senior technical staff to focus on other business critical areas.

In essence, taking on the best practice of virtualisation, de-duplication and consolidation of storage will enable organisations to optimise service levels cost effectively, and enable organisations to continue to drive profitability.