According to the recent IDC India survey, 66 percent of the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of 467 mid-sized and large companies surveyed expressed the hope that the ongoing global economic crisis will come to an end by December 2009.

As per the CIOs surveyed, the key investment priorities in 2009 would include software-as-a-service; unified communications; business outsourcing and data warehousing; virtualization and open source.

However, IT research and consulting firm IDC India itself projects a lingering on of the slowdown, with IT spending expected to perk up towards the end of the 2010 second quarter. The IDC view comes with regard to the bigger macro-economic scenario and the holdup in terms of IT buying by most companies.

IDC substantiated its view by noting that, in 2009, companies intend spending only about 20 percent of the total planned IT expenditure on new purchases, thereby keeping back the balance for the management of their present set-ups. The product lines covered by the IDC include domestic market procures like access devices, networking infrastructure, software, storage, servers and technology solutions.

The study said that the companies' lag in IT buying will "directly impact hardware vendors and off-the-shelf software vendors. IT services vendors are likely to be the least impacted if they focus on providing services like infrastructure management, business transformation and business continuity."