Financial crisis does little to slow IT spending

Despite the financial crisis, there is no indication of dramatic reductions in IT spending, changes in priorities, disruptions of project pipelines or dramatic shifts in platforms, a 2009 Celent survey of U.S. chief information officers has found.
The survey canvassed executives in 33 of the U.S.’s property/casualty and life insurers during 2008 Q4 just as the financial crisis began to impact the insurance industry.
On average, 2009 property/casualty IT budgets are increasing 3.3% from the 2008 budget, although a number of insurers (especially large ones) report 0% increases, Celent found.
For property and casualty insurers, the biggest new project-spending category is policy administration, followed by policy service system replacement and operational improvements.
New application development is projected to account for 36% of budget allocations in 2009. Application maintenance and support is anticipated to account for 25%, while hardware/network maintenance and support is expected to account for 14%.
In terms of platform use, Windows and Linux are poised for significant growth over the next three years, while z/OS and midrange operating systems are poised for modest declines.
Celent believes this shift is a result of several trends.
“First, the continued acceptance and growth of SOA as a concept means that insurers who have traditionally stuck by the mainframes are feeling more comfortable investing in .Net or J2EE,” the report says.
“Second, scalability and reliability concerns with non-mainframe solutions are slowly being addressed to the point where functionality is now driving the choice, rather than the dynamics of computing power as delivered by mainframes and servers.”