IT shops got even stingier over the past two months, though they are expected to start spending a little more freely by year end, according to a new survey from The Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The brokerage firm’s IT Spending Survey, which it conducts every two months with 100 IT managers from large companies, found that about half of respondents have spent less than their budgets for the first half of the year and about half of those surveyed expect to underspend through the rest of the year. The survey was conducted at the end of June.
Once spending frees up, IT managers said their biggest demand will be for security offerings, customer relationship management applications, storage software, Windows and enterprise portals. Mainframes, Linux servers and data switching were among their lowest spending priorities, according to the survey.
As was true in the previous two surveys, 60 per cent or more of respondents said their ability to command favourable pricing terms with vendors was on the rise.
Asked about which vendors are gaining or losing share of their IT spending dollars, respondents pointed to EMC Corp. as the top gainer in storage, with Sun Microsystems Inc. being the top loser. Sun also was identified as the top loser of market share among server buyers, while Dell Computer Corp. had gained the most. Veritas Software Corp. was the big winner among software companies, Cisco Systems Inc. finished at the top among security providers, and Novell Inc. and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. were top share losers in software and security, respectively.