What type of blog would this be if I didn’t end the year with my 2010 predictions?

To begin on a positive note, IT budgets will go up in 2010 after a global average 4-5% decrease in 2009. In many respects, however, 2010 will be even more difficult on IT than 2009. How can I say this if budgets are increasing? Doesn’t this mean we will have more money to throw at nagging issues?

In general, most IT organizations have deferred maintenance on many core infrastructure and application items. For example, in the past, several of my peers would automatically refresh laptops at the three-year mark. I know many of them have extended this to five years. Even though the deferred hardware upgrades had a positive net impact on the budget, it was an increase in IT burden to manage old equipment as the “meantime between failures” increases. Now they are looking to upgrade these boxes. This is true for networks, phone systems, servers, applications… (How many of you are running Windows 2000 and need to upgrade?) (more…)