During the opening keynote today at Gartner Symposium / ITxpo, being held in Mumbai till 12 October, Gartner outlined how IT leaders must be able to respond to change quicker than ever before. There is a need for flexibility, and a need for agility.

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of Research at Gartner, said IT leaders should create two IT budgets for 2008. The first should reflect the same kind of marginal growth prepared during the past six years, while the second should assume the need to cut costs in response to the arrival of a possible recession.

"The business plans that you had in June are probably not going to completely address the changed conditions of your business in November," Sondergaard told an audience of 6,000 IT decision makers. "Together with your business colleagues and your CEO you are going to have to deliver new efficiencies, new innovations and new ideas to sustain profitability and growth. IT will be core to many of those responses."

The challenge for IT leaders is how they are going to react

"Simply delivering internally focused savings isn''t going to be enough," Sondergaard said. "You (IT leaders) need to step up to the challenge of delivering new solutions to those critical business imperatives."

On a worldwide basis, IT spending continues to grow at a rapid pace in developing countries. In fact, one-third of IT spending now occurs outside of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. This development will create new innovation in IT, new competitors, new usage patterns, and continued cost improvement benefits for users," Sondergaard said.

As IT moves East and South, it will mostly affect the growing areas of the industry. End-user spending will globally move towards software, services, and all aspects of mobility. These categories made up 57 per cent of spending in 2006, will become 60 pe rcent in 2008, and are forecast to have grown to 63 per cent in 2011.

Symposium / ITxpo is the industry''s largest and most strategic conference for senior IT and business professions. More than 6,000 senior business and IT strategists from virtually all major industries will have gathered to gain the latest advice on the biggest challenge: driving profits and performance with IT.

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