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Analyst Survey Finds IT Downgrades Estimated Spending Growth

A new survey of CIOs by analysts at Aberdeen Group finds that the IT executives are downgrading the amount that they expect to increase their technology budgets.

In the recent survey, conducted in January, enterprise executives expected to increase technology budgets by 2.7 percent over the next six to 12 months. A similar Aberdeen survey in September had CIOs projecting their overall budgets growing 3.7 percent over the next six to 12 months.

"The survey results show that IT spending growth will continue to be slow and incremental over the next six to 12 months," Aberdeen analyst Hugh Bishop said in a statement. Bishop said Aberdeen continues to forecast worldwide IT spending growth of about 4 percent in 2003.

In a somewhat mixed result, Aberdeen found that the average intent to purchase for all 35 of Aberdeen's application categories rose, while the average priority to purchase fell. "Aberdeen's analysis of this data is that more organizations are considering new application purchases but have yet to move into formal evaluation or purchasing processes," Aberdeen said.

There were bright spots among the categories. The top five categories for intent to purchase were content/document management applications, query/reporting/analysis, project management, Web management applications and Web analytics.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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