More bad news from Datamonitor

ANALYST DATAMONITOR says that half of global organisations are going to freeze their tech budgets in 2009.

The report on technology trends and IT budgets from this year is based on a survey of 8,130 IT decision makers from companies worldwide.

So, yet again, the credit crunch strikes, as the majority of enterprises are forced to cut back on their IT expenditure – apart from the healthcare sector which, let’s face it, needs to improve its services as much as possible.

Although the current economic state is partly to blame for this problem, Datamonitor says that there is more to it than this.

Daniel Okubo says, "Suppliers should be wary in assuming that the recent downturn in IT budgets is a short-lived phenomenon. For the past couple of years enterprises have been cutting back IT budget increases as they adopt a more cautious viewpoint of the global economy."

Datamonitor says further that the number of enterprises planning to increase IT spending has fallen significantly over the last four years – so the problem seems to be quite deep-rooted.

Over half of the respondents said that they expect to keep budgets the same next year as this year, 37 percent expect an increase, and 13 percent believe budgets will be cut. µ