April 10, 2007

US IT Spending Update: Q1 2007

Q4 2006 Data Suggests Tech Slowdown Already Happened

by Andrew Bartels

with Ellen Daley, Heidi Lo

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Did the feared slowdown in the US economy and the US tech sector actually hit in the second half of 2006? While the data is conflicting, we believe that is the case. True, US GDP data for Q4 2006 continued to show moderate 6% growth in tech investment. However, there was clear evidence of a slowdown in the US economy to 2.5% growth in real terms, and the Q4 2006 data for US revenues of 40 large IT vendors showed a dramatic slowdown in growth. We believe that the vendor data is giving a more accurate measure of tech purchases. The result? It now looks like our projected tech slowdown actually happened in late 2006 and will carry into the first quarter of 2007. Therefore, the outlook for the rest of 2007 is one of moderate improvement. Storage hardware and software, infrastructure management software, application servers and business process management (BPM) software, and applications will be the hottest areas of purchase. Servers, communication equipment, operating systems, application development software, and IT consulting services will lag the most.

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