IBM: IT spending to experience 'seismic' shift

Recently, Steve Mills, IBM's head of systems business, relayed to an audience that traditional IT spending will experience a radical shift during the next two decades. According to Mills, businesses will spend less on hardware and infrastructure and more on business analytics.

While companies have typically spent their IT allocations on creating infrastructures to gather business-critical data, this information is useless to them unless they have the correct systems to analyze it. Mills stated companies can gather all the information they want, but without the ability to decipher it, it's "of no use."

Instead, companies will work fervently to adopt, implement and utilize analytic infrastructure. The rise of cloud computing and other managed IT services has made this process easier, especially as companies use the technology in favor of physical hardware.

“Over the next two decades, we will see a significant shift in IT spending,” Mills said. “You will see two to three times the spending on analytic infrastructure. It’s not that people won’t continue to spend on hardware, but there will definitely be a shift.”

IDC recently reported worldwide IT spending on the cloud will increase to $44.2 billion by 2013, which supports IBM's prediction.