Our Gartner Predicts 2006 weblog discussion will be drawing to a close soon, but contributions are still welcome.

We have had some stimulating responses. For example, Roman Virdi believes mobile networks might be replaced by Wireless VOIP while David H. Deans thinks Telcos are so ‘marketing challenged’ many of their new services never reach the mainstream On the question of employee owned and maintained PCs Christian Kesper thinks our prediction is wrong but he concedes it may work out for other devices such as Blackberries.

I was not surprised to see a number of comments on our IT specialist job market reduction prediction. The projected rate of decline raised eyebrows and brought some disagreement, while a couple of contributors seek more guidance on what they should do about it. John Paquette offers his own suggested solutions for both companies and individuals.

On an optimistic note at the start of 2006, Braam Broodryk and a contributor named only Wilfred, seem to agree IT can contribute to saving lives in healthcare as our analysts suggest. Nishanth Nottath is even able raise a positive note about regulation in the banking industry when he suggests a combination of 'intelligent' technologies and BPO will reduce the cost of compliance over time.

Thanks to those who have contributed so far.

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Those outside of the financial services sector often assume it invests regularly and deeply in IT to maintain competitive advantage. However, our analysts find that parts of the US insurance industry have become legacy encumbered and relatively inefficient in their core operations. As a result, the BPO providers they require to survive are in a strong position to start taking their business. This is a form of the macro trend we call ‘business green-fielding’. The BPO providers have the advantage of a clean slate – they can build much more efficient, integrated processes on a modern technology base. However it may be hard to accept that insurers will willingly outsource to the companies that will then

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By 2008, 10 percent of companies will require employee-purchased notebooks.

This prediction may seem bold to most IT managers, who will find it hard to see how they can give up control safely. On the other hand, just 10 percent of companies moving to this over three years isn't really a revolution, and perhaps we have left the question of any eventual tipping point ambiguous.

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Through 2008, investigation of new technologies will slow as discretionary budgets divert to regulatory compliance.

Everybody in the IT industry is aware that Sarbanes-Oxley is a big part of the compliance burden, but won’t most of the effort be completed within a year or so? Why will the resource drain continue through 2008?

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The job market for IT specialists will shrink 40 percent by 2010.

Let's start with the obvious question that would arise in India and Eastern Europe – you surely don’t mean there will be a 40 percent reduction everywhere, do you?

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By 2010, 30 percent of U.S. homes will use only cellular or Internet telephony.

Is this all good? People will move to the cheap and free calling VoIP provides, but they may be losing functionality. After all, plain old telephone service (POTS) is extremely reliable, but cellular telephony calls in the U.S. still suffer from variable quality and sudden disconnection, don't they? In a local power outage, POTS works because the line drives the equipment, but consumer-grade VoIP equipment needs mains power to operate.

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A 50 percent growth in healthcare software investment will halve preventable deaths by 2013, saving more than 20,000 lives in the United States alone.

To those who are used to creating dollar-based IT project business cases, this prediction may be an eye opener. With medicine becoming so expensive and complex, our healthcare analysts seem to be suggesting IT investment is becoming the most cost-effective way of saving additional lives – compared to developing new drugs or surgical procedures, for instance. Is this true?

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Welcome to the Gartner weblog on some of our major new predictions for 2006 and beyond. Every year, we ask our community of hundreds of analysts to present their outlook for the years ahead. Although many of these predictions are tightly focused and of interest only to specialists in a given area, some have broader significance. For example, many of the predictions are important to those working on a particular type of system or project, but they will seem relatively unimportant outside that domain. However, a few predictions are of particularly high impact and significance to a wide audience. Sometimes, that's because they apply directly to us all. Other times, it's because a prediction about what's happening in another space can cause us to think differently about our own situation.

Here, we've chosen the few that rose to the top of the pile, and we invite your comments and discussion via this weblog. As we introduce each prediction, I will invite the authoring analysts to respond to the ideas and thoughts you post and to some of the thoughts I had when I first read it.

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