With economic hardships reaching into business and financial sectors around the world, it was only a matter of time before we saw the tech industry affected. Techtel Corporation released findings today announcing that overall tech spending has fallen drastically over the last four quarters and that only an estimated 3.9% of companies are expected to increase their IT spending. Michael Kelly, CEO of Techtel, remarked: "Tech"s hesitation about future demand is well-founded. U.S. IT spending is slowing and expected to continue doing so. It appears we may enter a period of declining IT spending during the second half of 2008."
Affecting mainly smaller businesses with less than 250 employees, this decrease is expected to continue as the reason companies cited for not spending in their tech departments was the poor economy. Three times as many companies cited this as a reason for decreased spending in the second quarter of 2008 (77%) as they did in the second quarter of 2007 (26%). Unfortunately, delaying the purchasing of business computers, updated software and other equipment can put a company, it"s employees and customers at risk and result in additional spending in the long run.
This is the first time since Techtel Corporation started tracking IT spending in the second quarter of 2004 that such a decrease has been seen.