Unisys flags 2006 trends

Unisys has been doing some serious thinking about the local industry over the Christmas holidays.

The services company is predicting that the industry’s current burning issue — the lack of IT skills — will be a major issue in 2006.

Unisys is predicting that the lure of work in the US and Europe and IT professionals switching to part-time and contract work will see the skills shortage really bite.

The solution according to Unisys Asia Pacific regional human resources director, Melanie Laing, was to throw more money at the techies.

“In the past, talent management and retention programs have been a perk for employees," she said in a statement. "Effective talent management is now a business imperative. Companies will no longer be able to retain a competitive advantage without it.”

Employers should also look at increasing flexible working options for employees, finding the right employees in the first place, and performance management to keep staff satisfied and engaged.

The company has also had its open source thinking cap on recently, also looking into the open source market. The company is predicting that smaller developers will be calling the shots in the year ahead.

“We’re set to witness a stand-off between some of the traditional independent software vendors trying to keep the market as it is and smaller ISVs taking advantage of the open source development model,” director of programs and alliances, Mike Dooner, said in another statement.

The operating system war would also centre around UNIX and RISC versus Linux and Intel, rather than Windows Data Centre Edition versus Enterprise Linux, he said.