Report: Storage Spending Poised for Growth

OMAHA, Neb. -- A new study covering planned expenditures across 26 technology categories including hardware, software and services, shows storage as the only category poised for overall growth in 2009. In addition, virtualization emerged as the key trend impacting the industry, as organizations focus on achieving IT goals through squeezing efficiencies from reduced budgets.

The survey, conducted among 450 IT professionals in the U.S. and UK was a collaborative effort between Millward Brown, Research International, and Lightspeed Research to leverage the perspectives of LinkedIn members via the LinkedIn Research Network.

While overall spending on Storage was only expected to increase by a marginal amount (less then 1%), this is in stark contrast to other hardware categories which showed declines between 2-3%.

Steve Ingledew, Managing Director of Millward Brown's Technology Practice observed, "In times of recession, there is a heightened need to protect what you have and in many ways, storage is to technology what insurance is to financial services; with data increasing exponentially and with the appetite for risk low, this is an area in which you simply don't want to compromise."

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