14 DAY TRIAL // According to IDC's U.S. IT Spending forecast, more and more service providers and corporates spend a significant part of their IT budget on networking equipment. The report said that on the service-provider side spending is aimed at implementing new services based on "IPTV, fiber-based broadband access, next-generation wireless data and enterprise network services." On the other side, clients "are heavily engaged in projects relating to VoIP, mobile computing, geographic integration, intelligent networks and virtualization, which are focusing attention on the network and driving investment in new equipment."
Even if IDC expects IT spending on networking equipment to drop in the coming months, the overall spending increased by 12% in 2007, from only 8% in the last months of 2006. As many companies are upgrading their PCs to make them Vista-ready, the sums spent on PCs will also increase from by 8% this year. Software spending is about 9% this year and "the software market continues to drive overall IT industry growth", according to IDC, as cited by PCWorld.
After two years of heavily investing in storage solutions, companies spent less this year in this department, the increase being of only 4% and maybe 3% the next year. According to IDC, more and more companies prefer lower-cost solutions at the expense of proprietary servers and mainframes. Investments into the midrange servers briefly increased this year, ?partly as a result of firms adopting some larger systems with a view to the rollout of virtualization", however using virtualization will act as an inhibitor in the long run for the server market.
Even if IT spending was done in 2006 mainly by large corporations, this year's first place in IT investments will be taken by small and medium-sized businesses. IDC said that an increase in the U.S. market by 6.9% is expected this year, compared with only 6.3% as was expected from last year's forecasts. Large firms are likely to keep up the IT spending trends in 2008 as well, but only if "positive economic scenarios hold true". If "negative economic scenarios become a reality", large firms are very much likely to stop all investments in IT infrastructure, "resulting in a sharper downtick to corporate investment plans."