By Howard Solomon
Assistant editor, Network World Canada
As I write this on Friday morning, global markets are in a semi-state of europhoria on the expectation that the U.S. government is going to take dramatic action to save the American financial industry. The state of the world economy, of course, has an impact on the budgets IT managers have to spend. How bad its it out there? Bad enough that this week Nortel called a quick meeting with financial analysts to alert them well in advance of November's third quarter results that revenue won't be what was expected. As a result, to make sure analysts knew Nortel was on top of things, CEO Mike Zafirovski announced it will try to sell its metro Ethernet division to raise some money. Have revenues suddenly started falling at other ICT companies? We don't know yet. Another vendor is trying to put out the word that things may not be so bad. At this week's Interop conference in New York, NetQoS flaunted a press release stating that of more than 100 attendees surveyed, 85 per cent indicated that their network management budgets will either increase or remain flat in 2009. Only 15 per cent indicated that there would be any decrease, while 39 per cent indicated that expenditure on network management would increase in 2009. Well, this is rather flimsy evidence. The statistical accuracy of a such a small sample of people makes the survey almost useless. To get real insight into ICT sector spending in these stressful times, discard anyone who tries to forecast next year's spending and instead look for vendors' quarterly financial results. For many companies the books will close at the end of this month on the third quarter, with results to be announced starting in October. We'll know soon enough what the real picture is and whether Nortel is an early signpost of a widespread trend or if, among network manufacturers, it is being abandoned by customers. Meanwhile, let us know what you're seeing.