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Revealed: Which IT jobs will survive the credit crunch
Time to get the architecture training in...

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Monday 29 September 2008

The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specialising in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.

According to analyst house Forrester, as organisations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.

Tech Hotspots: The list

1. Silicon Valley
2. Bangalore
3. London
4. Tokyo
5. Boston
6. Cambridge
7. Shanghai
8. Tel Aviv
9. Seoul
10.Beijing
11.Chennai
12.Pune
13.Singapore
14.Helsinki
15.Moscow
16.Hong Kong
17.Hyderabad
18.New York
19.Sydney
20.Shenzhen

Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."

He added: "I think you're going to get a lot greater interest in the enterprise version of these architects."

Cecere explained that companies may look at becoming more global to combat the economic downturn, leading to increased demand for enterprise project managers, IT transformation specialists and process experts.

In addition, the Forrester VP said enterprise vendor managers could be in more demand as companies look to cut costs through better value tech deals and outsourcing.

But Cecere said this consolidation activity will put operational and infrastructure roles at risk as they can easily be duplicated within organisations. "Within those groups there'll be highly specialised areas which will still be in demand for a long time," he added.

These could include specialist skills in storage, software reuse (as part of SOA) and mobile and wireless devices.

Other effects of the credit crunch on the IT industry are expected to include longer hardware refresh cycles, increased use of software as a service and a reduction in available contracting roles.