31% of Western European SMBs will increase their IT budgets

During 2004, the majority of the IS budget of Western European small and medium businesses was absorbed by internal overheads such as personnel and facilities expenses (51%). Only 20.2% of the total IS budget was dedicated to new IT initiatives, confirming SMBs' moderate investments during 2004, IDC says. 31% of SMBs expect to increase their IS budget. The insurance/other finance and retail/wholesale sectors show the highest willingness to increase budget in 2005. A low percentage of public sector (government and education) institutions expect to increase their budget. The high penetration (95.54%) of security technologies is a consequence of the emergence of the Internet as the main computing platform in the enterprise, which has resulted in high security demand among SMBs. 87.2% of SMBs have plans to continue investing in antivirus software.