IT spending in 2006 is expected to remain flat among Canadian businesses, reaching to a little more than $40-billion, a new study says.
The survey, called IT Business in Canada: 2006 Mid Market and Large Enterprise Opportunity, was conducted by market analysts at Ipsos Reid. It reported that this year's spending ($40.93-billion) would be down marginally from 2005 spending, which was $41.35-billion.
Mid-sized companies are expected to experience a decline of 4 per cent overall. This is the largest IT revenue-generating segment in Canada, accounting for $23.9-billion in 2005 and $22.9-billion in 2006.
Ipsos said the drop in expected spending is the major factor influencing the lack of overall IT spending in 2006. It studied 375 Canadian companies for its second annual IT-spending study.
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Large enterprises are expected to increase their spending by 7 per cent, from $4.6-billion in 2005 to $4.9-billion in 2006.
Small businesses are expected to see a low growth in spending of 2 per cent from 2005 to 2006, bringing overall spending in this segment to $13-billion in 2006.
The highest per-company spending is still seen among the large-enterprise segment, with a significant proportion focused in very large enterprises of more than 1,000 employees, Ipsos Reid said, outstripping per-company spending in the mid-market by a margin of three to one.
This Ipsos Reid research used 2005 as a baseline year. The three major IT sectors included in the analysis are software, IT services, hardware and infrastructure. Ipsos included 254 mid-and-large companies in its analysis, with an additional sample of 121 small businesses to develop the 2006 IT spending table, bringing the total number to 375.
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