NWC News Network, Feb. 20 2009, 1130 hrs
In the recently released findings of its 2009 CIO Agenda Survey, Gartner has estimated that Indian IT spend would grow at 5.52% in 2009. The findings indicate that although there will be a growth in IT spending budgets it will be lower than 13% spends reported in 2008.
The global survey of 1,527 CIOs was conducted by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) from September 15 to December 15 2008 and represents CIO budget plans reported at that time. The survey observed flat IT budgets across enterprises in North America and Europe, with slight increases in Latin America and a slight decrease in Asia/Pacific.
“Indian companies will have to rapidly adapt in order to maintain their value proposition in the current volatile global economy,” said Peter Sondergaard, global head of research at Gartner. “CIO’s in the country need to recognize that IT's contribution to their enterprise extends beyond just cutting costs. They must have confidence in their ability to use IT to significantly increase business performance."
Findings from the survey indicate that the top ten business priorities in 2009 for CIOs range from reducing enterprise costs, improving enterprise workforce performance, and business process improvements which feature higher up on the list, to increasing the use of information/analytics systems in decision making, managing enterprise change initiatives and targeting customers and markets more effectively.
The survey also estimated that while Business Intelligence (BI) applications such as analytics and data mining, enterprise applications such as ERP, SCM, CRM and server and storage technologies including virtualization featured highest on the CIO’s list of top 10 Technology priorities, collaboration technologies, legacy application modernization, upgradation, and modernization and workflow management found bottom spots on the list.
The findings also indicate that CIOs in India have shifted their focus from investing in emerging technologies to increasing the return on their existing investments and infrastructure with expected investments in business intelligence applications and information consolidation in order to raise enterprise visibility and transparency, particularly around sales and operational performance, in ERP technologies, with plans for simplification measures that reduce the number of ERP instances, vendors and software licenses and in server and storage technologies to meet enterprise wide demand for these services.
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