TechWeek Readers Expect Lower IT Budgets

Two fifths of TechWeekEurope readers say that their organisations IT budgets will contract during 2013 but the remainder say that IT spending will either increase or stay the same at their company, according to the results of our latest poll.

What IT budget?

We asked our readers whether their budget was set to go up or down – and one third responded that they didn’t have any IT budget to play with whatsoever. These, we assume, are lone wolf operators, people far from the budget function in their organisation, or people only prepared to look at TechWeekEurope in a private capacity.

Eliminating those readers from our results, and focusing on organisations which do have an IT budget. Of these, 40.6 percent said that their funds would reduce in the next twelve months. This appears to contradict a recent Gartner report which said that IT spending was set to grow, especially on cloud and mobile.

However it isn’t all doom and gloom as a lucky 31.5 percent of respondents said their their IT budget was going to increase this year and 28 percent said that IT spending at their organisations was going to remain roughly the same – which, in this climate. probably counts as a victory.

As well as getting more or less money, IT  budgets are also facing many constraints on where to direct their budget. It has been reported that one third of IT budgets are now going on cloud-based projects, because these shift expense away from capital expenditure, to predictable monthly fees.

At the same time, security is crying out for money, and sometimes the only way to justify an increase in that budget is to survive a cyber attack.

By and large, the IT managers profiled in our IT Life section report healthy IT budgets – and the secret to keeping the money coming seems to be obvious: show real benefits to the business, and demonstrate the funds are being put to good use.

Our next poll asks whether you think Michael Dell can turn Dell around after completing a takeover with hedge fund Silver Lake and returning the eponymous company to private ownership. Let us know by answering in the right hand column.

What do you know about Dell? Try our quiz!