2007 Enterprise IT Budget Outlook: North America

The outlook for IT spending in 2007 is improved from 2006. Enterprises expect to increase their IT budgets by 3.8%, up from a 3.2% planned increase at this time last year. This increase in spend will have a positive impact on security spending as well as on IT R&D. This should come as good news to CIOs, who, on average, continue to struggle with providing tangible business value to their companies, improving IT efficiencies, and supporting corporate growth. For 2007, IT shops plan to spend the majority of their efforts preparing for disaster, securing the infrastructure, upgrading storage and servers, and replacing outdated systems. To do so, they plan to limit services spend and leverage proven financial justification methods — such as ROI and TCO — to justify budgets.