Waiting a Little Longer to Replace Work PCs
Posted on May 16, 2009 |
Hardware is bearing the brunt of IT budget cuts, according to a new survey from Gartner. Spending on PCs, servers, storage and printing systems is expected to decline 14.9 percent in 2009 while overall IT spending will drop by 3.7 percent. The survey polled 475 IT decision makers in companies with 1,000 or more employees during February and March. About 43 percent of those surveyed expected a decrease in spending on client computing hardware in 2009 compared with 2008.
Still, many of those companies were simply delaying purchases of PCs and not canceling them entirely, suggesting that corporations are simply waiting a little longer to replace those devices. That’s possible because computers are now so powerful that even 3-year-old laptops can still be useful for many kinds of work. But, if companies wait too long to refresh their stock of PCs they’ll likely face problems with hardware breaking which can be costly.
The survey also noted differences in how specific countries were handling PC projects. Nearly half of all respondents said that some of their PC projects would go on as planned in 2009. About 85 percent of respondents in China and 64 percent in India expected most of their projects to be deployed as planned. But in the U.S., only 29 percent of companies planned to continue moving forward with those projects as originally planned.
Overall IT spending is expected to bounce back with 2.4 percent growth in 2010, although IT hardware spending will grow just 0.8 percent.
