Leach was commenting on Marc Benioff's keynote speech at Salesforce's Dreamforce event in San Francisco, which included reference to a Gartner statistic that predicted chief marketing officer's will spend more on IT by 2017 than chief information officers.

"It is contentious to predict that IT will be obsolete in twenty years' time. However, you have to at least acknowledge that the trend is a reality," said Leach.

"The role of IT will remerge, but it is going to be more of a systems integrator (SI) role. SI is going to be the core function that organisations have to maintain and I think the [CIO] job title will change to something along the line of product manager."

He added: "Lines of business will gravitate to where they see success, if they see success in the market with a company, they will go there. IT in the future needs to understand where these success trends are occurring and be a [guiding influence] of where the business will go."

Leach's comments were made during a panel discussion on whether companies should build their own custom applications using Salesforce's development platform, or whether they should buy in applications on the AppExchange.