IT spending priorities

Several annual surveys came out in the last few weeks trying to forecast IT spending trends for 2010. All of them pretty much agree on the same general trends and focus areas of investment dollars. First, the sentiments for increases in IT spend in 2010 have improved. This is most likely due to general feelings about the economy and its stability. While most economic leading indicators continue to show improvement, lagging indicators continue to remain in a fragile state. Nevertheless, this is an improved state from last year or even earlier this year. As a result, IT professionals have a less pessimistic view of 2010 spending.

The spending priorities for IT in rank order of most important to least important are:

Storage
Networking
Servers
Software-infrastructure
PCs
Software Applications
IT services

Without a doubt, storage, networking, and servers are the primary focus areas for IT leaders. The main drivers of the focus in these areas are modernization and capacity for growth. The modernization is in the form of server and storage virtualization. For wireless, it is user generated data traffic growth driving the need for more storage and processing capacity for core back-office systems.

Within the network category, WAN optimization, IP telephony, Layer 2-3 Ethernet switching, and video conferencing are driving spend. Believe it or not, Windows 7 does not appear to be getting too much focus right now. WAN and IP telephony are most likely getting attention because they can potentially lower costs as traffic volume goes up.