"Changes in technology are eliminating the need for skills that have historically been important," Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research, said at Gartner's ITxpo in San Francisco. He predicted a shift away from IT specialty skills toward employees with more business-analyst skills.

That forecast made sense to Janet Topic, CIO of Trimac Corp. She said the Calgary, Ontario-based transportation company is interested in more plug-and-play IT applications and services, such as software on demand. "The solutions that will make Trimac more competitive are less dependent on key IT skills," said Topic.

Gartner analysts also predicted that by 2010, the IT industry will recognize that the Linux and Windows operating systems have "closed the gap with Unix" in terms of management, reliability and performance, said John Enck, a Gartner analyst. That will lead to declining interest in new Unix installations, although Enck said that the effect of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s decision to open-source its Solaris operating system is difficult to estimate and that new innovations arising from that movie could change the outlook.

In regard to the hardware and operating system shift, Eoghan Bacon, manager of systems at BTM Capital Corp. in Boston, said the Gartner hardware forecast made sense. Bacon's company has been using Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP-UX operating system to support one of his company's applications -- but the application vendor is moving to Linux. As a result, he'll be moving from an HP 9000 server to an x86-based blade system. "I can run it, obviously, a lot cheaper on Linux," said Bacon.

Not everyone agreed with Gartner's assessments, especially with the idea that Windows will achieve the same level of reliability as Linux.