This year's IT budgets go unspent
IT executives are holding back from spending already cleared budgets this quarter, according to the latest survey from New York investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Link: ROI not key to IT spending, says Intel
The report said the majority of chief information officers surveyed plan to spend below their budgeted limit by the end of the year. And this majority has strengthened since Goldman’s similar survey in September.
Goldman Sach’s IT Spending Survey was conducted among a panel of 100IT executives from Fortune 1000 companies. IT spending is likely to lag behind improvements in other industries as CIO’s await improved performance in their own businesses before returning to IT spending, according to the survey.
‘IT spending now seems to be one area where companies actually have clearvision. Unfortunately, the outlook is clearly flat,’ said the report.According to Goldman Sachs’ research, the IT market is likely to grow atjust two to three per cent at least until the second half of 2003.
Cutting IT costs and spending remains the top priority among CIO’s for thecurrent quarter and into next year, the survey found.
That puts further cuts ahead of other spending priorities such as application integration, security, and disaster recovery.
It is a sentiment echoed by users across the IT market including governmentsector as well as enterprise IT buyers. ‘It is of vital importance tojustify cost savings from any new project,’ said Arthur Meachum, CAD SystemManager at Caddo Parish, Louisiana which recently deployed a new Oracleproject to update its website in real-time.
Although Oracle stood out among vendors in the survey, with the majority ofapplicable respondents expecting to increase database capacity of theirOracle implementations next year, it is not set to grow its share of budgetspending during 2003.
Top market share gainers in the survey include Cisco, Microsoft, and Network Appliance, along with BEA Systems, EMC, HP and IBM.