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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (58394)	1/4/2002 2:51:54 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Where Is IT Going? What Lies Ahead for the Sector in 2002 By Tim Bajarin Special to ABCNEWS.com abcnews.go.com Jan. 3 — As a part of my work in general, I meet with computer, consumer electronics and telecom companies all year long to get an understanding about their current and future strategies and seek their views as to what they see happening within their markets in the near future. Each year at this time I look into my crystal ball and give them my predictions for the coming year, and over the next few weeks I'll share my outlook for the sectors — starting with a look at IT markets. IT spending declined dramatically in the last year. While some of the downturn can be pegged to the recession and current financial woes, IT managers tell me some of the slowdown was also due to the increased spending on IT products from 1998 to early 2000 in anticipation of the Y2K problem. In fact, as firms prepared for the worst in 2000, they ended up with more new PCs, servers and software products than they really needed. Of course, this increased spending and highly precautionary stance actually staved off any serious Y2K IT disasters and most major companies emerged from the experience with IT departments that were very much up-to-date on technology. Securing Updated Technologies Although some surveys at the end of last year suggested that IT spending would continue to be weak in 2002, I predict that barring any more major terrorist disasters we will actually see spending begin to rise by mid-year and be back in full swing by 2003. The first half of this year will see departments spending resources on responding to issues that came out of the Sept. 11 attacks. They started dealing with these issues in October but will really need to devote more time and money dealing with security issues as well as implementing major distributed computing strategies. Every large company wants to make sure it can avert any potential cyber-terrorist attacks on its company information and is working hard to increase security on servers and private company data.