Chua from Atos Origin agreed: "In 2007 the biggest challenge will continue to be the availability of skilled personnel. Today there is a skills gap," he said, "tomorrow the gap only widens as new technology comes into play."

"Enterprises now engage in discussions on whether to outsource, in-source, deploy a BPO strategy, or use a combination of the three," said Yau. "The overall strategy must support [current and future technologies, cover disaster recovery sites, key remote sites, the main facility and even standardization of datacenter 'environmentals' in the same way IT standardizes technology platforms."

Looking forward

Hannaford described the datacenter market as "buoyant," noting that business declined in 2000 after the Y2K "bug" failed to manifest, but has rebounded as IT managers see problems when they either attempt to cope with legacy systems or deal with heat-problems from new servers.

"The outlook for 2007 appears bright for the server market in Hong Kong," said Yau. He added that research firm IDC predicted quick growth in the blade server market, pegged at US$9 billion in annual revenue by 2008 and representing 29 percent of server units shipped, with Linux-based servers will account for 29 percent of unit shipments and about US$9.7 billion in revenue. Windows-based servers are projected to grab the lion's share with 60 percent of all server shipments and revenue of $22.7 billion.