IT spending to be hit?

Finextra

The UK’s financial services sector will cut back on technology spending over the next year as firms move to tighten their belts during the economic turmoil, according to a survey by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The survey of 100 representatives from financial institutions found that firms are set to slash IT spending in the coming year. When asked if they’d spend more cash on technology over the next year, the balance of respondents in the survey was -6%.

Securities trading is most likely to see a fall in spending, with a balance of -35% predicting more technology spending over the next year, a swing from +53% in December.

Banking respondents were only marginally more optimistic, with a balance of -24% compared to +49% in December.

But other areas of the finance world were far more positive about the prospects for increased IT spending. Insurance broker lead the optimism with a positive balance of 38%, closely followed by building societies on +34% and general insurance on +33%.

The demand for solutions that can provide more effective return on investment should continue. The business benefits operationally and financially could override any debates about projects in virtualization, data center consolidation or grid for that matter. The business driver, the revenue saved or generated will be the driver, a more business focus, for every $ spent I want $1.5 or more value. We’ll have to see one of the interesting things to consider on the client side is that in some respects how true a statement this is.

Remember if you’ve got a year old or two year old pc/notebook, it might actually be cheaper to replace it than fix it, to replace that system board, that memory chip, when you consider the ‘downtime’ the time taken for an engineer to visit, collect the unit, run diagnostics etc. It’s all going to depend how you pay for your desktop services, the volume of units involved etc.