IT Spending Inches Upward

Corporations are opening their wallets a bit wider than previously expected, reflecting rising optimism among executives toward their business climates, a market research firm said Monday.

IT spending in 2004 is now expected to increase by 2.4 percent over last year, Forrester Research said, based on a survey of more than 870 chief information officers in large North American companies. The analyst firm had predicted six months ago a 1.7 percent increase.

Consulting, transportation, construction, finance and insurance organizations are expected to boost spending the most this year, increasing their IT purchases by about 4 percent over last year.

The survey also found that businesses planned to get back to basics in 2004, upgrading core technologies like security, business applications and PCs. The additional dollars also will be spent on customer-information technologies, security and mobile networking.

For customer service, portals are expected to see the greatest growth, with 61 percent of the respondents planning deployments. Fifty-six percent are deploying content management software, and 48 percent business intelligence applications.

Companies are apparently building a foundation for mobile computing, with 82 percent having virtual private network deployments in production, and 54 percent having completed deployments of personal firewalls. More than half of the respondents plan to increase deployments of these technologies, with 60 percent expecting to increase implementations of wireless local area networks during the next 12 months.

Adoption of enterprise applications, such as procurement, supply chain management and customer relationship management, had leveled off, the survey found, and firms were about evenly split on development environments -- 56 percent for Microsoft's .Net and 44 percent preferring the Java 2 enterprise platform.