By 2012, 20 per cent of businesses will own no IT assets, according to new research.

A variety of factors, such as virtualisation, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems are driving this trend claims Gartner.

The company also predicts that IT budgets will essentially be flat in 2010, in spite of rising market positivity: “CIOs faced multiple budget cuts in 2009, wiping away four years of budget increases, giving CIOs basically the same level of resources as they had in 2005. While there are some signs of recovery in the 2010 projections, these will not overcome last year’s cuts.”

"As organisations make plans to navigate the economic recovery and prepare for the return to growth, our predictions for 2010 focus on the impact of critical changes in the balance of control and power in IT," said Brian Gammage, VP and research fellow, Gartner. "With greater financial and regulatory oversight for all IT investment decisions, few organizations will be unaffected."

In other predictions, the analyst firm believes that India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 per cent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market in the same time period.