A record year
2010 was record year for Bluewolf, both in revenue and new customer acquisitions.  Great for Bluewolf, right?  Well, yes, we like that, but it’s more than just what’s happening at Bluewolf headquarters in New York. Beyond our walls, it’s an optimistic indicator for the entire IT industry.

What a record year tells us is this: the recession from 2008 to 2009 pent-up demand for IT investments and services. In the panic, tech spending budgets were frozen. Companies were on lock down.

But Bluewolf, born during the dot com bust a decade ago, knows firsthand that a recession necessitates innovation, not less. To get through these types of cycles, tech spending is imperative for an organization’s long-term growth.

So with 2010 came the inevitable need to thaw the frozen IT budget. Shrewdly, companies are now modernizing their IT departments through a tremendous escalation in capital expenditures, including hardware, software and staffing investments.

Furthermore, this march towards modernization is strategic in nature – not one-off, tactical IT upgrades, but a true desire to align IT with the business.

Which means that CIOs today are in transition. 2010 was for playing catch-up from the spending freeze. 2011 is the time for CIOs to innovate and position themselves for the future. It’s time to look beyond cost-cutting and efficiency measures and recognize the need for value-adding productivity. Shift from managing resources to managing results.

For today’s new CIO, innovating through technology is the only way to position his company for the future because it’s the only way to compete against companies in the ecosystem. And luckily for the CIO, innovating through technology in 2011 is a fraction of the cost from 10 years ago.

Tomorrow: State of the [IT] Union Part 2
Michael Kirven talks about ‘putting capital to work’ and which technologies are Hot and which are Cooling Off.