Hardware and IT management make gains

Server upgrades and consolidation projects are on the minds of many IT professionals going into April. According to our monthly IT Priorities survey of 500 IT executive managers, hardware upgrades moved up a notch to claim second place, just behind the longstanding number-one IT priority, wired and wireless. The data shows a continued trend first observed at the start of the year in which IT organizations dump their last-generation servers and desktops in favor of new machines.

Lower on the list in third place came software infrastructure, and fourth, security. Rounding out the top five this month is IT management, which managed to unseat Web technology dropping it to sixth place. Our respondents cited regulatory compliance, process improvement, and outsourcing as the top management initiatives.And OS Migration switched spots with Data Management, where last monththey were numbereight and sevenrespectively.

Additionally, our data shows that among current IT projects, software infrastructure, networking, and IT management each command roughly 16-18% of IT spending across surveyed organizations.