IDC Study Says US IT Execs Will Cut Spending to Consolidate in 2008

 By: Jeff Myhre, Chief Editor (5/1/2008) 

IT research house IDC recently put together a survey of 27 CTOs and senior IT professionals in the US and asked them what their new project spending for 2008 looked like.  According to the US government, the economy is still growing, but for these guys, the recession is here.  About half of them reported pressure on their budgets from the current economic conditions.  Half of the rest said things were neutral to date, but they expected negative impacts in the coming months.

Related to that is a shift in funding, back to the corporate center.  This is to enhance efficiency and to give the accounting department more control.  In order to lower costs and boost performance, the surveyed executives are largely focusing on “infrastructure improvement, including data center consolidation and virtualization, application consolidation, and data consolidation.”

The survey revealed that there is a large core of aging applications, and 25 of the 27 executives surveyed are modernizing their applications.  In some cases, this is easier said than done because of “legacy client/server architectures and hard to support languages, including COBOL and Visual Basic.”

Another important point is a rising skills shortage “in areas like SAP, .Net, VOIP, and Java, as well as business analysis, security administration, and project management.”  The US workforce is aging, and these executives were not averse to looking abroad for talent.  With the current immigration debate, this might get tricky, and outsourcing to other countries isn’t going to play well in an election year.

The survey was turned into a presentation and those interested should contact IDC and request “IT Executive Views: IT Priorities and Investments (Doc #212005).”

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