Aussie enterprise IT spending resilient: Gartner

A survey of people responsible for spending money in March proved that investments in client computing, printing devices, storage and servers would stay the same in the fiscal year 2009 compared to 2008.

Half also said they anticipated raising spending on virtualisation and 38 per cent said they would do the same with green IT.

The latter impressed Gartner managing vice president Matthew Boon.

"It's good to see that green IT projects are not being shelved due to the downturn," he said.

"These kinds of projects are win-win investments as they drive both operational efficiency and reduce power consumption as well as reducing overall carbon footprints."

Conferencing, collaboration and VoIP technologies were also singled out as aras for investment.

However, only 11 percent of respondents expected to increase spending on cloud computing, which Gartner attributes to a lack of understanding of what the technology can deliver.

In the survey, 20 percent of respondents had not heard of cloud computing and a further 26 percent said they had heard of the term but didn't know what it means.

This mirrored the results of another recent survey that showed confusion over the terminology.

Overall, less than a quarter of Aussie respondents said their organisation had cancelled any IT projects since October 2008, in light of the state of the economy, Gartner said.