This at least is one way to read some interesting market snapshots as captured by IBM, which has just released details of a global look at some 2,000 end-user organisations in what Big Blue sees as the ‘midmarket’ space (in case you want to query what makes up such an entity, for these purposes it’s been defined as operations employing between 100 and 1,000 people).
Its top level finding is what it labels "a sharp increase in confidence," with nearly two thirds (62%) of the UK firms contacted expecting their IT budgets to increase over the next 12 to 18 months – somewhat up, one could say, from the lowly 11% who felt that positive when polled just 12 months ago.
Note we said UK there and in the version of the results we’ve been shown, there is some fuzziness about global findings versus local ones; in this report we have been strict and only used what are clearly UK stats.
And what are they looking to invest their hard-won extra budget in? Analytics and cloud, it seems (and yes, those are things IBM is pushing, but then so are a lot of vendors).
Specifically, the breakdown suggests, again, in UK terms first, 72% of medium-sized UK firms are "actively pursuing analytics to improve decision making and operational efficiency," while 70% are adopting cloud.
We are also told that collaboration, mobility and customer relationship solutions are also of growing interest.
Some may find the health of cloud uptake surprising; it’s often seen as more of an enterprise or even SME option, but the research claims more than two-thirds of those contacted (in 20 countries) say they are either planning or currently deploying such technologies to improve IT systems management while lowering costs.
We do now in the interests of balance have to talk about the fact that not everyone’s opening the champers. For the remaining 38%, by definition, don’t see any need for expansion, with 19% saying their IT budget will remain unchanged in 2011 and the other 19% think they will either decrease or they are unsure about what will happen. And there are patently still financial strictures – a third of respondents cited access to affordable financing as a barrier.
Still, concludes IBM, while the emphasis remains on technologies (like cloud, of course) that are seen as delivering cost reduction, there is some appetite for more infrastructure purchasing to bolster that.
This is borne out by the historical comparison about what was said last year: in 2009, 47% of those who responded to the questionnaire characterised their company’s mindset as one of "efficiency and cost control," this time round, only 19% saw the corporate mindset as that – with the remaining 81% back to concentrating on "customers, growth and innovation".
It’s worth concluding that the study (conducted Q4 2010) contained results from a variety of economic areas, so not just the US but also some BRICS (Brazil and Russia) as well as Asia Pac. So optimists can see this as heralding a real easing at last of the "IT Winter" of 2008-11… possibly?
