Vendor consultant

His latest incarnation sees Sykes moving over to advise vendors, prompted by what he sees as a seismic change in computing architectures. While notions of cloud computing still divide many industry watchers, Sykes believes that remote, hosted, web-based services have the ability to change the basis of how IT is run and how services are delivered.

"You've got one fundamental thing that's happening at the moment," he argues. "Over the last 10 years, a bunch of companies like Google have been teaching themselves how to commoditize online services. But in the process they've taught themselves how to do the complex, underlying stuff. They have the physical assets [in the form of datacenters and networks], proven reliability and robustness, and people don't realize how good it is."

Sykes believes that the opportunity for the likes of Google and Amazon.com is to take that infrastructure and use it to serve applications, or provide a platform for others to hawk their applications and services.

"If you look at what most CIOs are doing, most are either running operations in their own datacenters or they have outsourced them but have them managed by an EDS or a CSC. They are still 'boundaried'. Their critical mass might be quite large but it's nothing like a Google datacenter. So their cost of utilization and robustness is nowhere near as good as a Google, a Betfair, or an Amazon. I can see the beginnings of a services offering from all this, in which, if you're willing to escape the confines of having your own datacenter, you can go out into the cloud and access your data processing and storage."

But doesn't commoditization mean that firms lose competitive differentiation? Sykes won't have any of it.

"There's this image of commoditization that it's bad but if you're a brilliant retailer you ain't going to create competitive differentiation with a different infrastructure.

"There's a very sloppy piece of language in IT called 'technology drivers' but technology is the enabler and the driving comes from human involvement. If you've got another year of learning ahead of your rival you'll always be ahead of them."