A Barclays survey of 100 US and European CIOs says nearly half (46%) expect their company's IT spending to rise in 1H14, with 20% expecting it to drop, and 34% expecting no change. 
A Barclays survey of 100 US and European CIOs says nearly half (46%) expect their company's IT spending to rise in 1H14, with 20% expecting it to drop, and 34% expecting no change. Those figures compare with September survey levels of 43%, 27%, and 30%.
At the same time, the firm cautions that spending growth is uneven: Software, networking, security, and cloud services demand is healthy, but servers, storage, and IT services remain soft.
IT spending growth is seen accelerating in the second half in both the US and Europe. Barclays thinks larger budgets, macro stabilisation, and a need for equipment refreshes (due to high utilisation rates) could be helping out. Interest in the concept of a software-defined data center is gaining traction, but big data (hyped considerably last year) is losing it for now.
The survey comments: "We note that many responses from the survey likely occurred before some of the recent volatility in the stock market. In terms of end markets within technology, application and infrastructure software as well as networking showed an improvement in sentiment vs. our prior survey. However, servers and storage noticeably down-ticked as well as IT services (however server spending growth improved)".