CIO Spending Priorities for 2002

Tempe, AZ -- February 5, 2002 -- Chief information officers have infrastructure investments on their minds this year, according to a recent survey of CIOs from Aberdeen Group.

The survey of 151 technology executives across 14 industries revealed that security and gateway services, as well as enterprise management applications, top the list of information technology spending priorities for 2002, with greater than 50 percent of the executives polled indicating that their firms intend to purchase business applications in these categories this year.

Security and gateway services include firewalls, virtual private networks and remote access systems, while enterprise management apps include network, system and application management solutions.

Aberdeen interpreted the emphasis on infrastructure as indicating that enterprises are focusing on "doing more with 'what they have' rather than pursuing significant enterprise-class investments" this year.

Application development tools, database software and back-up and recovery software round out the top five, with greater than 40 percent of the organizations predicting a purchase in these categories this year.

A second question in Aberdeen's survey elicited how serious a company is about investing in a particular category of technology. Back-up and security software, as well as security for Internet commerce scored highest on this question, with greater than 80 percent of CIOs indicating a high or medium-to-high level of priority for these categories.

Notably, customer-relationship management and customer service and support systems also scored high on this question, with about 65 percent of respondents saying that such systems were a high or medium-to-high investment priority, although nearly 10 percent of respondents said this was a low priority for them.

Enterprise management applications, database software, application integration software and project management software also ranked as high priorities for the companies surveyed.

Aberdeen's survey matches 9 to some extent -- the results of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's regular CIO survey. In the latest edition of the Morgan Stanley survey, released in December, 37 percent of CIOs ranked e-commerce initiatives as a top priority, followed by security software (34 percent), application integration (33 percent) and storage hardware (28 percent)

Twenty-four percent of the CIOs in the Morgan Stanley survey ranked CRM software as a top priority.