IT Spending For 2003 Looks Slim
In
spite of vendors’ hopes that IT spending could start picking up
this year, survey results are still less than optimistic.
CIO
Magazine’s Tech Poll results for March did indicate that 12
month forward spending plans are now at 6.1% over last year,
nearly a 1% increase over February’s 5.2%, but this is biased by
the high increases projected by small firms (fewer than 100
employees), averaging 16.2%. Large firms (more than 1,000 employees) were at a much
smaller increase of 1.5%
About
one-third of the 252 participants (32.3%) claim they plan to
increase spending through the rest of this year and 29% say they
have already increased spending.
CIO’s
participating in the survey prioritize their increases in spending
toward security products/services, storage hardware/ software and
computers (desktop/mobile/server).
There was also increased interest in spending for big
ticket "infrastructure software" products.
It’s
worth noting that this survey was taken during the days just
before the Iraqi war started, which may have depressed results a
bit.
IDC
also released IT growth figures this month.
It believes the economic uncertainty and the Iraqi war will
together depress spending for the rest of this year, and has
lowered its estimate of IT growth for 2003 from 3.7% to 2.3%,
somewhat less in the U.S. than in Europe.
(Please
note that the IDC numbers are for the rest of 2003 and the CIO
Survey numbers above are for the 12 months from April 2003 through
March 2004, perhaps accounting for the differences.)
However,
IDC believes that in 2004, IT spending will rebound in every
geography.
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