Stephen Gill, VP and managing director of HP UK and Ireland, says that many large organizations currently spend 70 to 75 percent of their IT budget on managing their existing infrastructure. This leaves little room for innovation, which can bring further value to the business.

The growth of cloud computing enables companies to effectively outsource the need for maintaining complex infrastructure and eventually lead to them reducing their IT staff.

"Overall you will see less people but with different jobs [and] more exciting roles," says Gill. "The junior roles are the ones that are usually dull and that will be automated anyway."

Gill says that HP recently completed an internal reorganization of the company's strcuture. And although he did not specify how much of this strategy involves cloud computing, he says the company has chopped its IT staff from 19,000 to 10,000 over the past three-and-a-half years.

He attributes this drastic reduction to the majority of IT departments wanting to be "flexible and responsive to the needs of the business and that is hard to if you are spending 70 percent of your budget on infrastructure."

In the past, other industry analysts and vendors have mentioned the same trend towards hosted applications, utility computing and outsourcing affecting the way companies will manage their internal IT in the future.

Industry analyst Gartner (gartner.com) predicted in 2005 that IT departments in midsized and large companies will be 30 percent smaller in 2010 than they were in 2005.