I am sure the last thing you want to hear out of me right now is bad news about IT spending, so in the spirit of being constructive, I’m going to latch onto two tidbits out of market researcher Gartner this week that are (relatively speaking) positive for all members of the high-tech channel. (Vendor and VAR alike.)

So, yes, IT spending will not grow this year or, just barely. Surprise! Not. But at least budgets haven’t been slashed into oblivion (yet), and there ARE 10 technology areas where Gartner’s worldwide survey of 1,527 enterprise CIOs provides a brighter outlook, because they are seen as helping businesses overcome current economic conditions. (Here’s the press release for the Gartner Executive Programs Report, “Meeting the Challenge: The Top 2009 CIO Agenda.”)

The priorities cited most often were:

1. Business intelligence
2. Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM)
3. Servers and storage technologies
4. Legacy application modernization
5. Collaboration technologies
6. Networking, voice and data communications
7. Technical infrastructure
8. Security technologies (look how far down on this list!)
9. Service-oriented applications and architecture
10. Document management

And here are ways that a technology partner can help grab a CIO’s attention:

• Help them set priorities
• Make the budget for the project by finding some way to save money through the investment
• Help them do things faster
• Help them modernize, by showing the savings in operational costs

This brings me to the next positive bit of news both for vendors that use channel partners AND channel partners themselves: Gartner sees the practice of outsourcing technology needs as increasing in 2009, although be prepared to rejustify your existing contract if you’re a VAR or integrator that has any kind of long-term agreement in place.

The Gartner research also underscores rising adoption of managed services and software as a service, as well as the research and experimentation going on with infrastructure utility services and cloud computing.

Here’s Gartner’s outsourcing press release. It may help you prioritize where some of your investments should go over the next six to nine months.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Business Management, Business Planning, Technology Trends, high-tech channel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.