Businesses Plan to Spend More on IT This Year

By Rieva Lesonsky

Is your small business getting ready to spend on IT in the next six months? If not, you may want to change your plans. The latest CDW IT Monitor survey found that IT decision-makers’ optimism—and plans to invest in their businesses’ IT—have reached their highest point since the survey began in late 2007.

Almost every sector in the survey was planning to spend on IT in the coming months, including state and federal governments, and small, midsize and large companies in the private sector. The biggest increases were in midsized businesses, with the percentage planning to spend on IT up 7 percent since the last Monitor in October, and in state and federal governments, with the percentage planning to spend up 11 and 10 percent, respectively, since October.

In addition, plans for increased spending were found in almost every industry, including healthcare, manufacturing, IT, professional services, retailing and manufacturing.

Overall, 80 percent of respondents plan to spend on new hardware, with small business hardware spending plans up by 9 percent since October—the largest jump among groups surveyed. An overall 82 percent of respondents plan to spend on new software, with small business IT departments again leading the pack—the percentage planning to spend on software was up 10 percent since October. (Tied with small businesses, local governments’ planned investment in software was up 10 percent, too.)

Midsized businesses and state governments were the most likely groups planning sizable investments in IT. And midsized businesses and federal governments were most likely to be hiring new IT staff. (Overall, projected IT hiring for the next six months is down from last October’s poll.)

What are IT decision-makers’ highest priorities in the next six months? Among those planning to spend on IT, networking (58 percent), security (57 percent), virtualization (56 percent) and cloud computing (47 percent) topped the list.

“The IT spending outlook has reached a significant milestone. More IT decision-makers are feeling optimistic about the prospects of their IT budgets increasing, and they are anticipating significant IT investments in the next six months, especially on the hardware and software fronts,” said Neal Campbell, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at CDW. “We believe that organizations will continue to look at technology investments as ways to boost efficiencies, increase productivity and gain new competitive advantages in 2012.”

What’s the upshot? Even if your business won’t be spending more on IT this year, chances are some of your key clients will—and that could spell opportunity for you.

Image by Flickr user Martin Terber (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under small business, Small Business Success Index, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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