PCs still take up the largest proportion of Irish IT budgets at 22pc, down from 23pc in 2005, technology research firm iReach revealed yesterday.
“Across hardware, software and services spend by Irish organisations we see few highlights in terms of significant spend increases outside of managed services and networking hardware,” iReach managing director Oisin Byrne said.
Byrne said that the PC industry is still in a state of flux and that the industry needs to deliver an annual increase of over 20pc in unit shipments in order to increase year-on-year revenues.
“At a global level we see the impact of this on Dell most specifically as HP and Lenovo continue to make inroads in terms of efficiencies and also the knock-on negative impact on Intel and positive impact on AMD,” Byrne said,.
IReach’s research showed that the network and storage market is performing well in Ireland with increased spend reaching almost 8pc for storage and almost 10pc for networking kit.
The Irish corporate market is the main spender on storage systems while network spend increases across the board in the corporate and small and medium-sized enterprise market.
Byrne warned that there is a slowdown under way in the managed services market for IT services. “Government uptake of managed services has slowed over the summer with some internal ‘strategy’ concerns but we expect to see this pick up towards the end of this year and also accelerate in 2007 once the policy elements are ironed out across Government departments.”
He said that the slowdown in spending in the public sector has, however, been augmented by some large co-location deals being signed. “We have seen some large IT shops move to co-location services for a number of reasons: to release expensive floor space, create real-time (or hot site) disaster recovery solutions, increase system and infrastructure resilience and squeeze costs.
“We expect 2007 to see some pressure on available co-location floor space as some large Government departments come to market. Outside of outsourcing services, other IT service sectors continue to see pressure on revenues,” Byrne concluded.
By John Kennedy
