Between now and 2008, software code will become more modular and reusable, and allow businesses to react to change more quickly. Half of today's technology suppliers will swamped under a wave of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies. IT outsourcing will become commonplace. These changes add up to "a massive disruption to the IT workforce", according to Ian Bertram, vice president with analyst firm Gartner Asia Pacific. "There will be a workforce reduction, particularly in mature environments like Singapore," he said. Speaking to reporters at a seminar yesterday looking at IT trends in the coming years, Bertram said that by 2007, the tight integration of IT to business processes within a Web services framework will become the norm for most companies. "Software code will be generated for a Web services environment. I can get a new service, and suck that code into my environment, rather than re-coding or paying for a coder," he said. Given the changes, today's software houses had better look into providing software as a service to stay competitive, said Bertram. By 2006, Gartner sees that over 80 percent of business-application products sold worldwide will be service-oriented. And to make things more dire for developers, by 2008, powerful data-modelling and code-creation tools, supervised by small, one- to three-person teams of business analysts, will generate three-quarters of business software. Large programming teams working to months-long schedules will fade away. Coders today should not be too worried about their jobs in the short term, but as changes take hold, "pieces of their job will go away," said Bertram. Taking on board business skills will be essential for IT workers who want to stay relevant, he said. More bad news for those in the IT workforce: despite signals that tech spending will soon go up, half of today's tech companies will vanish by 2007. There are just too many of them around today, said Bertram. However, things will look up again. From 2007, the sight of a few big vendors reaping the rewards of decreased competition will draw new entrants, when again there will be a return of venture capital cash and innovation, said Bertram.