Spending shifts

The events of Sept. 11 have caused many IT executives to shift their spending priorities in 2002 toward disaster recovery, security and videoconferencing, but the weak economy is having a far greater impact on IT budgets than the terrorist attacks.

Those are some of the key findings from Network World's annual IT spending survey, which was expanded to include questions relating to the September attacks. A total of 598 IT professionals responded to the survey, which was conducted by Research Concepts of Berlin, Mass.

When it comes to overall spending for 2002, IT budgets appear to be inching up only 3.9%. That's a far cry from the 9.9% increase seen in 2001. Forty-two percent of this year's respondents say their 2002 spending is increasing, while 30% say their budgets will be flat and 28% are facing budget cuts.

Not surprisingly, only 35% of the IT professionals surveyed said that their 2002 budgets are adequate or more than adequate, while a sizeable majority - 65% - stated that their 2002 financial resources will be inadequate to handle the tasks at hand.

When asked which specific areas will receive more money in 2002, the top answer by far was security, which was listed by 62% of the IT professionals surveyed. Disaster recovery was named by 45% of respondents, followed by storage, wireless, servers, remote access/ teleworkers, network management tools and LAN infrastructure.

Then we asked about the impact that Sept. 11 had on spending. Thirty-six percent said they'll be spending more on disaster recovery because of the attacks, 33% said they'll increase security spending, 17% plan to boost videoconferencing and 14% are looking at increased remote access investments specifically because of the events of Sept. 11.

But only 11% of respondents said they will receive additional money as a result of the September attacks, while 63% said there is no change in their budget, and 26% are shifting resources within their budget to areas that have become high priorities.

Finally, nearly 30% of IT professionals had to delay a technology upgrade slated for 2002. The most common upgrades that are being put on the back burner are operating system upgrades, enterprise applications such as customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning, wireless and infrastructure or backbone upgrades.

But IT professionals, by an overwhelming margin, said the upgrade delays are due to the economic slowdown, not to any budget shifting caused by Sept. 11.

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Contact Features Editor Neal Weinberg