Acceleration in the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing and virtualisation within the enterprise will result in a fifth of businesses owning no IT assets whatsoever by 2012, according to new research from Gartner.

The market analyst argues hat while the requirement for enterprise hardware, from desktop computers to staffed data centres, will remain consistent at its current level, responsibility for this equipment will increasingly shift to third parties. These will include both external data centre and service providers, and enterprise employees themselves, of whom more and more will take advantage of their own laptops or smartphones for work purposes.

Because of this, Gartner forecasts, enterprise IT budgets will be scaled back or allocated elsewhere for more strategic projects. Subsequently, vendors will also be forced to reconsider their own strategies in order to meet these changes in the business IT landscape.