Hard Facts: April 15, 2002

According to the survey of 127 MIS executives at enterprise firms, defined by CRN as those with at least 1,000 employees, 60 percent expect their technology budgets to increase within the next 12 months, a higher percentage than for small or midsize businesses. However, when these increases will actually occur is the key question, as enterprise firms show little sign of loosening their wallets in any significant way.

Areas in which enterprise companies are investing,and which offer the greatest opportunities for solution providers,include security and application and database development. PC servers and networking hardware are the top hardware-spending priorities for enterprise companies, in contrast to smaller businesses, which cited desktop PCs as their No. 1 spending priority. Newer technologies such as VPNs, along with more traditional technologies including Unix servers, are also significantly higher spending priorities for large companies compared with their smaller counterparts.

Solution providers have yet to be convinced that a recovery in large-company technology spending is at hand, according to CRN's monthly solution provider survey.

Over the past three months, solution providers have been reducing their expectations for large-company spending growth. Moreover, second-quarter sales expectations in this market segment are lower than for either the small- or midsize-company markets.