There were two interesting press releases from Gartner last week that caused mixed emotions in the IT world. The news was good or bad, depending on how you looked at it.

1. Gartner Says Outsourcing Will Continue to Grow in 2009 Despite Economic Slowdown (press release here)

2. Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of More than 1,500 CIOs Shows IT Spending to Be Flat in 2009 (press release here)

At least IT spending is flat and not slashed, although it might come at the expense of lay-offs in favor of outsourced and software-as-a-service providers. Saas is ideal because it doesn’t require the large upfront fees associated with in house IT expenditures.

I had already posted my Top 5 predictions for 2009 on January 1, and it’s good to see my list in the 10 outlined below.

According to the report, the top business priorities include:

• Business intelligence
• Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM)
• Servers and storage technologies
• Legacy application modernization
• Collaboration technologies
• Networking, voice and data communications
• Technical infrastructure
• Security technologies
• Service-oriented applications and architecture
• Document management

If you are an IT Manager or Director, the only two things you can help with the bottom line is time and money. That is, do things better, faster or cheaper. Remember my joke: Good, Faster, or Cheaper – pick any two out of three.

Software as a Service and cloud computing will be more accepted in 2009. The timing is right.

I’ll bet Marc Benioff is laughing all the way to the bank, 10 years after he coined the term “The End of Software”.