Do you spend on IT or pull back during tough economic times? It partly depends what you're spending that money on. Here are the views of a software company CEO, and the CIO of a world-famous company, on that topic.Jim Goodnight, CEO of business-intelligence vendor SAS Institute, doesn't expect even the credit-crunched banks to stop spending on software that helps them save money or boost profits. "During a period of recession in the past, we have typically done very well, because it's a time that companies begin looking inward and try to improve some of the processes," Goodnight told me during a telephone conversation on Monday.

"When times are good, and customers are making lots of money, they don't worry about optimization," Goodnight continued. "I just talked to a retail customer 20 minutes ago, and that's precisely what he was saying; 'We need to rely on optimization software now more than ever.' "

A few weeks ago, I paid a visit to Jean-Michel Arès, CIO at Coca-Cola, at the company's Atlanta headquarters. When I asked Arès his views on handling uncertain economic times, he stressed the importance of "very strong alignment" with business managers on deciding what projects must go through, and working together to make the "tough calls" on what should be held.

Coca-Cola is taking a number of steps to keep costs under control, he added, including the sourcing of some IT work across the globe, simplifying its application infrastructure, and using virtualization in its data center. In fact, 12% of Coca-Cola's servers already are running on a virtual platform.

Are there areas of IT you absolutely wouldn't stop investing in, even if the economy hits rock bottom this year? And how beneficial (or efficient) is it to corroborate with business managers on figuring this out? Share your thoughts below, and also check out my conversation with Arès on this topic and others in the video below: