ZDnet has an article referring to Gartner’s prediction.

Gartner issues its own 2012 prediction: end of IT as we know it

Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 1:59 pm

Which will come first: the end of the world on December 21, 2012, or one-fifth of organizations dumping their IT assets?

I don’t know about the first item, but the Mayans certainly didn’t seem to see the cloud computing wave coming. But Gartner says it did, and issued a prediction that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Gartner says this is a result of cloud and virtualization, and extends to client systems as well — employees will be using their own personal desktops, notebooks, and devices on corporate networks. In other words, all third-party ownership:

Here is the Gartner news release.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.