Seamless integration has long been a Holy Grail for IT managers.

Anybody who has been in the industry for more than 10 years will be able to reel off a long list of failed initiatives aimed at making IT systems more interoperable.

Open standards have long been a mantra for most vendors, but one that remains under the shadow of perhaps the most popular cliché in the book: “The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.”

David Roberts, chief executive of user group The Corporate IT Forum, says it all for IT leaders in our article on Cisco’s new unified datacentre strategy: “We have constantly called for suppliers to work more collaboratively to effect seamless integration and interoperation of infrastructure components.”

The history of IT shows that interoperability is the key to making any technology or trend a success. When the industry failed to agree on networking standards, users just chose one –­ IP ­ that was proving pretty successful outside of vendor control, and so the internet era began.

The success of Microsoft Windows was largely due to the fact that one supplier realised that most users wanted all PCs to look the same when they switched them on (with apologies to the fervent Mac community) and could run any off-the-shelf software they wanted.

More recently, once Apple turned downloading into a seamlessly integrated art, the music and video industry changed forever.

These days, we have a whole class of software ­ categorised by the awful name “middleware” ­ that owes is existence to the fact that technology products do not work together. Is IT the only sector able to make money out of its own inability?

Spurious costs on integration are an unwanted irritation for IT managers. If vendors want to help their customers through the recession ­ – and so survive themselves –­ they need a new approach to working together.

There is a certain irony in Microsoft putting the man that runs its Windows business up for interview with Computing in the same week that the government announced a new commitment to open source.

Bill Veghte faces the daunting task of convincing IT leaders that Windows 7 is the real thing – a stable, ready-to-go system that is ideal for businesses stuttering through a recession to invest in. It would be hard enough were it not for the bad feeling that persists around the disappointment of Vista.

But the challenge for Veghte and his employer is now broader than ever. In the past, new versions of Windows have competed primarily with their predecessors. Thanks to the hiccup of Vista, in the years since the last seriously business-ready operating system, Windows XP, the world has moved on significantly.

No longer is there such a long-term desire for the energy-hungry, feature-rich, high-powered desktop PCs that have fuelled the success of previous Windows incarnations.

Just about the only area of the PC market that is growing at the moment is netbooks ­ – cut-down, low-cost laptops used primarily for internet access that run quite happily under Linux. Even Nokia is talking about moving into the netbook market as it converges with high-end smartphones.

Microsoft will face a new set of decision criteria from IT leaders – ­ not just when or if to upgrade, but what type of device is most appropriate, and which of a wider range of operating systems and applications to choose.

Meanwhile, the old cash cow of the public sector is increasingly opening up to new application ideas ­ – and in particular, open-source software. A new strategy announced last week aims to encourage equal status for open-source and commercial applications.

Admittedly, it is hardly the first time government has tried to make such a move, but Whitehall and council IT managers will now be asking themselves the same question as their corporate peers ­ – for how much longer will we really need Windows?

Innovation has become one of the most over-used words in technology, but it remains perhaps the most important one in IT leaders’ vocabulary.

It is one of those words that suffers for being too open to interpretation.

When it emerges from the mouth of a politician, you can usually assume it means little more than some vague

commitment to a policy to support skills development or encourage research investment and will no doubt be superceded by another new policy when it fails.

From business leaders, the word is often part of a warning that without it the UK economy will lose out to emerging innovation hothouses such as India and China.

So it is all the more important that IT managers know what they mean when they put innovation at the top of their priority list – which is exactly where it should be.

For one thing, it is not to be confused with invention. Instead, innovation is about smart people doing things more smartly than the competition. It is about ways to use emerging technologies that work for your business. And it means taking measured risks on new ideas and building a culture to support innovators.

There are two great examples in these pages. Lastminute.com two years ago set up an innovation group, who found the key to success is quick development, using agile methodologies to bring ideas to fruition.

At Visa Europe, the company faces a never-ending task of being smarter than the credit-card crooks. A constant process of innovation in product development is essential. Proof-of-concept testing helps to identify ideas that will work for consumers. There are valuable lessons that can be learned from both organisations.

Chief executives will always expect strict return on investment plans for any IT spending and especially so in a recession. But to make a real difference, it is return on innovation that needs to be part of the IT leader’s pitch.

And here is the good news… Apple and IBM are doing very well, thank you. Record financial results all round.

That’s that bit over. Now for the bad news.

Five thousand layoffs at Microsoft and another 5,000 at Ericsson. IT job cuts at Axa and Unisys. Let’s stop there before it gets worse.

Are you getting as fed up as we are by the constant stream of depressing stories emanating from the business world, and in particular the IT sector?

Computing is the first to admit that we are not slow in reporting such bad news, but sadly it is a fact of life at the moment. We’ll be the first to bring you the good news too, it’s just a little harder to find right now.

Nonetheless, it is heartening to see that IT managers are approaching the difficult times ahead with a mood of realism rather than being disheartened.

The first of what will be a regular quarterly survey of readers’ attitudes, the Computing Technology Barometer, shows that IT leaders are being cautious but not downbeat.

They expect little by way of budget increases, and are wary of the latest products and services being pushed at them by vendors, but where there are opportunities to deliver real benefits from the right technologies, they are forging ahead.

It is important to remember that driving change through IT does not necessarily mean buying lots of new products. There are often plenty of ways to make better, faster or smarter use of what you already have –­ and when you see well-established trends such as virtualisation, mobile computing and data security highlighted as priorities in our research, the implication is clear –­ IT leaders have become very good at making the most of a tough time.

So to borrow a phrase that someone else borrowed in a rather more important speech last week, let’s pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and keep IT at the heart of successful business.

Microsoft simply has to get things right this time.

The early buzz around Windows 7, the next version of the software giant’s most important product, seems to have been positive. This is just as well, since Vista proved to be such a huge disappointment among business users.

Microsoft may have touted impressive sales for the most recent version of Windows, but much of that seems to have come from the inevitable purchases from consumers, most of whom have little choice but to use the system pre-loaded on their home PCs.

Among enterprise users, Vista adoption has been something of a damp squib. Companies whose regular refresh cycle and software licensing deals made a Vista upgrade relatively inexpensive and timely were probably the only ones to make the jump.

Certainly Vista offers few advantages over Windows XP in terms of business benefits. A whizzy new interface ­ that hardly anyone uses because it is so resource-intensive ­ and better multimedia features are not top of the list for many IT managers. And given the problems with application compatibility that many people experienced, it just became an upgrade that IT departments could do without.

Microsoft says it has listened to the criticism, and Windows 7 is the result. The emphasis at first glance seems to be more on business productivity and easier manageability.

But looking further ahead, what will Windows 8 be like ­ and will it even exist, other than as a minor functional upgrade? Critics point to the unwieldy nature of the product, and the fast-growing code base is at odds with the trend to strip complexity out of the user device ­ be it PC, laptop or mobile ­ and put more of the applications on the web.

The newly named Azure, a cloud computing infrastructure, gives perhaps the best idea of where Windows will go in the future, as a hybrid PC/cloud environment.

But for Microsoft to ensure the continued commitment of enterprise users to Windows in the long term, it simply has to be lucky seven this time.

There is little doubt that software will be the biggest driver of technological innovation and business change in the years ahead.

But what will the future commercial model be for how software suppliers make the money they need for continued research and development (R&D)?

Where once hardware was the main force behind IT development as Moore’s Law dictated the pace of progress, today it is the capabilities provided by software that powers the web and the mobile world, as well as global competitiveness and productivity.

Vendors have survived profitably on the traditional model of selling licences -­ not always to the satisfaction of customers ­ but the process has worked.

The first challenge came from open source ­ “free” software available to anyone, although the technical complexity and need for service and support have been hurdles to overcome.

Nonetheless, now that such a normally conservative sector as schools is turning to open source, its legitimacy in the corporate world cannot be questioned.

However, the buzzword of the moment is cloud computing, a new term that encompasses technologies such as software-as-a-service, grids and virtualisation to offer an alternative route to access applications hosted somewhere out there on the internet.

Such software is rarely purchased using conventional licensing. Some is free, some is paid for on a per-user, per month basis. Look at the biggest software supplier to see the way things are changing. Microsoft is struggling to adapt its Windows and Office-driven income to the demands of the internet ­ a failed attempt (so far) to purchase Yahoo, billions of R&D dollars going into web-hosted applications, and speculation about a new internet-based operating system, codenamed Midori, that could one day replace Windows.

For IT managers, the future of software purchasing may be more unclear than ever, but your options are increasing, and the days of restrictive and often punitive licensing agreements may be coming to an end.