"And get rid of the dogma," Haight told his audience of hundreds of IT operations managers attending the event to hear Gartner analysis related to new technologies. "Have that sign say, 'We're open. We're open to new ideas.'"

Some of the newer ideas, such as fabric-based computing for storage, servers and networking, usher in the distinct possibility that no longer will the same number of operations and administrative staff be needed to keep an enterprise network going. That's because fabric-based computing works to increase automation of functions, relying less on manual changes.

During his presentation, Gartner analyst Carl Clauch acknowledged that if the technology is widely adopted in the enterprise, it should lead to reduced operations staff.

"Yes, that is the trajectory," he said. He added that many organizations, which are generally hiring staff now, won't necessarily reduce staff in the absolute because they will be able to redeploy them for other things. "But you could take some low-value labor off your environment," he said.

Reducing the cost of human labor is certainly one reason for deploying fabric-based computing, which he said allows the enterprise network to be set up not in the old way that's "pre-configured, fixed and bound" for separate storage and network servers, but instead as pools of processors, memory, I/O connections, adapters, network connections and storage that are bought individually, combined on the fly and managed via a "Fabric Resource Pool Manager."