IT budget in India to grow by 5.52 percent this year

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 20 February 2009, 19:43 IST
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Pune: In spite of overwhelming turbulences over the world economic scenario IT spending budget in India will grow at 5.52 percent in 2009, though it is far behind from 13 percent of the previous year, finds a Gartner survey. Further, up to 60 percent of the total budget would be used to run day-to-day operations of the businesses, 23 percent would be utilized to grow the business and 19 percent to transform the business. Gartner's '2009 CIO Agenda Survey' finds flat IT budgets across enterprises in North America and Europe, with slight increase in Latin America and a slight decrease in Asia-Pacific. The survey has covered CIOs who represent more than $138 billion in corporate and public sector IT spending, in 30 industries across 48 countries. According to the survey, Indian CIOs have shifted their focus from investing in emerging technologies to increasing the return on their existing investments and infrastructure and they need to extract more value from what they currently possess, rather than invest in new solutions. "Indian companies would have to rapidly adapt in order to maintain their value proposition in the current volatile global economy. Indian CIOs need to recognize that IT's contribution to their enterprise extended beyond just cutting costs and must use IT to significantly increase business performance," opined Peter Sondergaad, Global Head of Gartner Research and Partha Iyengar, Head of India Research, Gartner. Indian CIOs are expected to invest in business intelligence applications and information consolidation in orger to raise enterprise visibility and transparency, particularly around sales and operational performance. "They should also invest in ERP technologies, plan simplification measures in 2009 that reduce the number of ERP instances, vendors and software licenses and invest in server and storage technologies to meet enterprise-wide demand for these services," said the Gartner officials. Iyengar further added that Indian CIOs have to be decisive and resourceful this year and would have to set priorities that raise enterprise effectiveness.