50 per cent of firms will have commoditised their IT within five years

Financial and public sectors lag behind others in their rollout of factory-type processes

Industrialised IT will see standardised systems produced and procured

"I believe that 50 per cent of firms will have industrialised their IT infrastructures in five years' time," said Eric Grall, Atos Origin's executive vice president for global managed services.

Grall spoke to Computing following his attendance at a Gartner outsourcing event last week, where he participated in a panel session called IT industrialisation during the next economic wave: value-add or low cost?

Industrialisation here refers to IT systems that are pre-designed and preconfigured and must also be "highly automated, scalable repeatable and reliable," according to Grall.

This industrialised IT department will use common standard building blocks that allow customers and suppliers to reduce cost. It will also use a factory-based approach to creating common tools and processes.

The manufacturing and telecoms sectors are quite advanced in terms of the drive to standardise IT, while the financial sector and public sector are the least advanced. The financial sector is slower because its systems are highly complex and bespoke, while the public sector tends to lag behind other sectors in terms of uptake of new approaches to technology.

Grall argued that there was a consensus at the Gartner event that the market was heading this way, and quickly.

This industrialisation has been driven by flat IT budgets and the need to free up operating cost, and it will see the vast majority of the IT department made standard. Cloud services fit this model most accurately.

The change will see an increase in creative and development jobs, while those roles which entailed operating infrastructure will be replaced by software or middleware designed to do the same thing.