IDC sees increase in Australian IT spending

A tri-annual survey by market analyst IDC has found many Australian organizations plan to maintain, or increase, their IT spend.

Nearly 80 percent of the Australian organizations surveyed in IDC’s Market Sentiment Monitor, planned to either increase their IT budgets, or to maintain the same level of IT spending.

Andrew Milroy, director of software, services and consulting at IDC Australia said a relatively small proportion of the respondents to its survey planned to reduce their IT spending over the coming year. He attributed this to Australia not suffering as much of an economic downturn as a number of other western economies.

However, Milroy did believe that buying patterns were changing. "In the late 1990s [companies] were investing in lots of infrastructure...what’s happening now is companies are looking to make their investments work more effectively."

He said the survey gave IDC data to back up its forecasts that the PC and server markets were slowing, compared with growth in software and services. "We expect to see certain areas, like storage and security, to grow strongly," Milroy said.

He believes the interest in security is partly reactionary, due to the number of viruses, with companies putting processes in place to combat this. With storage, Milroy sees information becoming much more critical to organizations, which are looking at tools to manage this data.

The survey was conducted in November, and consisted of interviews with 250 senior business and IT people from medium and large sized Australian organizations.