I guess I am only moderately suprised that with the economy verging out of the recession, many businesses appear to be heading back down the Upgrade Highway, as is indicated in the results of this Robert Half survey of CFOs (posted at ZDNet). Nearly half of respondents from companies with more than 1000 employees indicate that they plan to invest in upgraded IT systems and services once the economy comes back. That category beat out every other potential investment in the survey, by more than 20 points.

As with all surveys I suppose I shouldn't take this one too seriously, and there is some fuzziness inherent in the question... what sort of upgrades? Is it to be business as usual, shoveling money into Microsoft's voracious maw, or are they going to go out and get themselves some shiny new cloud solutions instead? Will the upgrades actually save money, or are they going to burn it? How many of those respondents had actually curtailed previous upgrades, and for how many is this simply in the normal cycle? All difficult questions to answer, with importance to the ultimate meaning of the results.

One of the lessons I had imagined people to be learning during this downturn, and with the accompanying Vista debacle, was that upgrades were never all that they were cracked up to be... and now less so than ever. Many organizations that I have been working with have been having considerable success getting off the upgrade treadmill entirely, or at least masking it behind stable online services. They have smoother, more reliable service with less investment and less disruption than the traditional alternatives. I figured that many other companies, forced by frugality into making do with what they had and with lower-cost solutions, might have also learned the lesson that the comfortable, traditional three-year upgrade cycle is not only no longer necessary, but actually dysfunctional.

But then, maybe they have. Perhaps fifty percent is a low number in this context. Maybe, after two or three years of belt-tightening, we should normally expect almost everyone to be ready for upgrades when the cash spigot comes back on. It's hard to say. What is the attitude at your company? Gearing up to get back on the treadmill, or excited to go for new alternatives?