With storage, data, virtualization and analytics top priorities for companies in 2011, IT jobs are back in demand.

A report from newsfactor.com says there is plenty of action across the board for technologists with specialized skill sets.

Jordan Rayboy, president and CEO of Rayboy Insider Search, told Newsfactor that he is seeing lots of activity on another area of IT: senior level sales, marketing, engineering, consulting and management talent.

“Storage has always been a great place to be, because no matter how bad the economy gets, storage is always a sizable chunk of any IT budget. Every organization needs to store and manage their critical data. Storage administrators, architects and consultants will always be in high demand,” Rayboy said.

As TechZone360 previously reported, cloud computing, mobile applications and tablets, social communications and video rank among the most critical technologies that will be strategic to organizations in 2011, according to technology researcher Gartner.

Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloud-sourcing decisions and management.

While organizations may not integrate all of these technologies, or need to, others will heavily invest in certain areas and become more aggressive in deployments with potential for significant market disruption.

“Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and analyst at Gartner. “In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test or more aggressively deploy the technology.”

Steve Watson, a managing director at global search firm Stanton Chase, told Newsfactor that the CIO position “continues to grow in breadth of demands, complexity and responsibility to a wide range of senior executives.”

Because of this, he said, CIO talent is in demand, along with several first-level managers.

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