Aussie companies defy financial crisis and spend on IT

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 23 April 2009 10:52

Business IT - Technology

Boon said it was notable that 95 percent of respondents would increase investment in consolidation of servers through virtualisation in order to reduce overall power consumption.

According to Boon, IT infrastructure remains the biggest area for IT spending within Australian organisations and it also represents the biggest opportunity to drive operational efficiencies and minimise costs.

“It’s clear that technologies like virtualisation can help companies stay ahead of the curve amidst the doom the gloom and help position businesses to take advantage of the upturn when it finally comes.

“It’s also good to see that green IT projects are not being shelved due to the downturn. These kinds of projects are win-win investments as they drive both operational efficiency and reduce power consumption as well as reducing overall carbon footprints.”

Boon suggested that as Australian businesses prepare for the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2010, implementing carbon reducing technologies would become “increasingly compelling”.

Gartner also indicated that other technology investments that would attract increased spending this year include audio, video and web conferencing (49 percent), collaboration tools like application sharing (45 percent) and Voice over IP (44 percent).

However, surprisingly, only 11 percent of respondents expected to increase spending on cloud computing, which Gartner attributes to a lack of understanding of what the technology can deliver.

In fact, of Australia It decision-makers interviewed, 20 percent of respondents had not heard of cloud computing and a further 26 percent said they had heard of the term but didn’t know what it meant.