Gartner predicts IT advances will spur job cuts. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

Technology will continue to help companies become more efficient, but it could cost employees their jobs.

According to Gartner Inc., successful companies buoyed by a stronger economy and continued technological advances will lay off millions of employees within the next two years. Systems

that further automate existing manual operations will "substantially lower the labor load of business," according to a Gartner researcher. In addition, the consulting and research firm said information technology (IT) productivity is likely to outpace corporate revenue growth on an average basis, providing an additional impetus for downsizing workforces.

This was one of a top-10 list of IT predictions recently released by Gartner:

1. Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers. According to Gartner, optical bandwidth capabilities are increasing by 100 percent annually, while computing capacity is rising by just 60 percent per year. This will ultimately result in fewer, more centralized data centers and increased sharing of computing facilities between companies under an application-service-provider model.

2. Most major new systems will be inter-enterprise or cross-enterprise systems. Technology that lets companies tie together their supply chain systems and other applications will take off, but IT managers will have to figure out how to cost-justify investments in such systems.

3. Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies. Many users will be able to leverage cross-departmental and cross-company systems to react more quickly to changing business conditions.

4. Technology advances will result in job cuts.

5. The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market. Gartner predicts that half of today's software vendors will no longer exist by 2004.

6. Moore's Law (i.e., the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented) will hold true through 2010. Continued technological advances will make it possible for the following leaps in computing power within six years: 40-GHz processors, 1.5 TB disks in the average PC, 4GB to 12GB average PC RAM, and four to eight CPUs per chip.

7. Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007. As more personal and financial data is distributed online, consumers will increasingly rely on "forward-thinking" banks rather than Internet service providers as guardians of information.

8. Business activity monitoring will be mainstream within five years.

9. Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions. The linkage and synchronization between business units and IT will be better than it is today. In addition, business outcomes and mainstream accounting principles will drive application investment and deployment decisions.

10. The pendulum will swing back to decentralized operations by 2004. Many companies are recentralizing their IT activities to cut costs. But as the benefits of these moves become evident, improving economic conditions will lead senior management to push IT to decentralize yet again to help companies react faster to changing business conditions.