European CIOs are shifting from survival mode to a more forward-looking and proactive stance with improving IT service levels and quality becoming their top priority in 2010, according to a new study from IDC.
Cost reduction, which was the top priority for European IT decision makers a year ago, slipped down to the third position in the list of priorities, with enhancing IT security taking the second place.
IDC said that it believes it believes the recovery to be gradual and drawn out, even though the survey shows there are clear signs of market recovery.
On different software areas, Infrastructure software continued to show the brightest growth prospects in Europe in 2010. Overall, security software leads by a significant margin, followed by storage, server virtualisation, database and systems management software.
The survey, conducted on 733 IT decision makers or decision participants across Europe, showed that there are general spending improvements for all comparable software areas compared with a similar survey from February 2009.
Content management, collaborative applications, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications in particular have significantly improved indications of spending growth, IDC said.
According to the survey, some of the countries and industries most affected by the economic crisis are showing the strongest signs of recovery. Enterprise application spending in France and Italy improved significantly in 2010, while the Nordics and the public sector, showed limited improvement or even declines in spending growth for 2010.
The research firm said that demand from large enterprises in Europe is returning in 2010 in the enterprise applications segment. Growth trends suggest that large organisations with more than 2,500 employees have moved from poor growth in the 2009 survey to being largely on a par with midmarket organisations. Enterprises with fewer than 500 employees have shown relatively little improvement in spending growth.
