The IT Companies Shouldn't Buy

For the better part of two decades, the mantra of giant server and storage makers was the coming of the paperless office.

Well, scratch that idea. The stacks of paper that have been digitized leaving a vast digital trail sends chilling--and sometimes thrilling--shivers down the backs of corporate lawyers. The volume of paper is still growing. It's time to face reality: The paperless office is never going to happen.

Neither will the completely virtual corporation. There needs to be a core to companies or they just don't work right. You can't run them without employees. What else that core includes varies from one company to the next, depending largely on the corporate culture. But so far, no one has succeeded in making money with no employees. And those employees need some technology.
What seems to be more in question these days is just how much technology. In the case of a trading house or a distributor, technology is the heart of the business. But in other cases, the subject is wide open for debate.

Interestingly, the companies that are fostering that debate are IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, each of which have made billions of dollars by convincing corporations that they need an endless infusion of new technology. Now the big vendors have done an about-face, declaring that companies can offload many of their non-critical, non-defining applications and servers. In some cases, they can even offload their critical applications. The big technology vendors will even set up internal clouds and run them more efficiently than an IT department can--or at least that's the pitch.

read the rest > http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/28/paperless-office-virtualization-technology-cio-network-sperling.html