Information week has an article on this topic highlighting comments from Gartner ...Excerpts below:

Organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue have lowered their IT spending projections for next year because of higher costs to support core business operations, a market research firm says.

In the beginning of this year, companies expected to increase IT spending by 6%; that figure has been reduced to 2.8%, Gartner Consulting said Thursday. Among the factors that have led to the reduction is more money spent to support increasingly complex infrastructure and application requirements, rising energy costs, regulatory requirements, and other non-discretionary spending to keep the business running, Jed Rubin, director of Gartner Consulting, said in a statement.

"This increased run-the-business spending has consumed budget resources that were originally earmarked for more strategic and transformational investment," Rubin said.

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Prashanth Rai