Merrill Lynch & Co’s latest assessment of corporate IT spending suggests budgets are healthy and set to grow at 7% in 1999 and companies are quite advanced in their Y2K preparedness. It found just 10% of those it surveyed expecting a second half slowdown in spending because of Y2K issues. Microsoft, Dell, Oracle and IBM were perceived as having the most momentum by users.
Because many employees are now using handheld devices such as Palm Pilots, the brokerage expects more companies to begin support programs for these devices, up from the one third that currently offer such programs. Another one third of companies said they were considering support. Linux is used by 12% of those companies now but 54% said increased support for open source programs by hardware and software vendors makes it more likely they will use open source software.
