Almost half of the respondents identified cuts in the contract IT staff, full-time internal hires and IT consulting as the likely areas to get impacted the most in the short-term.

One third of the respondents said that strategic IT initiatives, systems integration, and managed services are likely to be allocated higher budgets.

Arkadiy Dobkin, chief of EPAM Systems, the Russian IT services company with well entrenched delivery capabilities spread from Ukraine to Budapest, said: "We saw a slight slowdown in the first quarter, but we are not sure whether it's the effect of the first quarter or the recession."

EPAM employs over 3,000 people and has an exposure of about 45 to 50 percent in the US market. It sees encouraging growth opportunities in Europe, particularly the economies with heavy reliance on oil and gas.

The BPO-related services are least likely to be affected by the slowdown. Almost half of the respondents said that within BPO, spending on sectors like finance, procurement and customer care will go as per plan. In the claims, mortgage and travel related BPOs, 44 percent of the respondents felt that their clients would continue their BPO projects.