5. There will be a continued consolid-ation of vendors in many segments.

It should take just two years, Baty says, for one major player from each of the major IT&T sectors to disappear. They may be merged, they may implode; but they will not be there in their current form. Besides the big getting bigger in order to wring more from economies of scale, smaller players will also be challenged thanks to the lack of any disruptive technology that might force user organisations to start spending heavily on new generation products and services. In fact Gartner is not predicting much in the way of disruptive technology until around 2007-2011, which it says will allow largely Darwinian forces to shape the vendor profile in IT&T until that time.

For CIOs it means a much greater focus on risk management when making purchasing decisions, to ensure that a supplier or technology will be around for the long haul. It will also demand far more attention be paid to service level agreements and how they will operate in the event of a change of ownership of a supplier. Baty says that CIOs need to consider what might happen if either the vendor or the product failed to survive a take-over or liquidation.

Gartner Action Item #1: Pay more careful attention to financial condition and future prospects in sourcing decisions during the next few years.

Gartner Action Item #2 : Take advantage of the slower obsolescence rate for software in the coming years to refocus resources on higher return alternative projects.

6. Moore's Law will continue to hold true throughout this decade.

Put simply, Baty says, this means: "things are going to get smaller and faster, and that will continue to hold for another eight or nine years". In terms of raw technology, Gartner believes "the 40 GHz processor projected in late 2008 will be around 150 GHz by early the next decade and internal PC storage will similarly balloon to more than six terabytes of capacity.

"Any time we look too far forward it is a challenge to imagine what work or needs could possibly fill all this coming capacity; but Boyle's Law (that a gas expands to fill its vessel) seems to hold nearly as true as Moore's Law for IT," Baty says.

While predicting that the semiconductor industry will continue to make the advances needed to maintain Moore's Law for the coming decade, Gartner does not yet believe those advances will be sufficient to generate a disruptive technology change.

Gartner Action Item: When scanning ahead, consider the steep improvements in technology that might turn a currently unfeasible strategy into a practical and competitive advantage.

7. Banks will become primary providers of presence services by 2007.

The continued consumer demand for mobile communications and computing devices is opening the way for new applications that will be valuable to organisations wishing to become real-time enterprises and drive down any latency between them and their customers.

By using presence services that can route information to any wirelessly connected individual or entity, regardless of their location, the dialogue between customer and supplier or employee and employer can be maintained. However, for most enterprises it will not be practical or economical to build their own network of presence services. Gartner predicts this role will be outsourced to banks, which already have extensive, reliable national networks and would be trusted sufficiently by consumers to hold information such as credit card numbers, addresses and preferences.

"A 7-Eleven store could do this [application] but the enabler would be the bank," Baty says. "There's a lot of trustworthiness with the bank plus it has the network. We are predicting that by 2007 the banks will become the primary presence services providers and be important in the real-time enterprise model." In some countries - particularly Japan, which has an established "street-to-face" vending machine culture, Baty believes this trend could take hold by 2004.

Gartner Action Item: Plan for a trustworthy provider of presence, instant messaging and e-mail services as part of a real-time enterprise design and implementation.