There was a skew toward medium to larger size organisations, consistent with the iStart subscriber bases, and the 567 organisations responding to the survey expect to have IT capital expenditure of $443 million during 2005.

We see several drivers behind the high level of investment intentions:

• Organisations are taking advantage of the high dollar to invest in foreign technology solutions;
• IT has become a more mainstream business tool to support all departments in organisations. This is evidenced by the result that 70% of the respondents are in non-IT roles and 94% said they were the decision-makers or influencers in IT decisions;
• IT now has greater support at the top level of organisations, with 23% of respondents being CEO, managing director or general manager level;
• Labour shortages mean that for companies to grow they need to get more productivity from their existing staff, and this is likely driving demand for solutions like CRM, mobile business, call centres, team collaboration systems, e-recruitment and document management systems;
• The ongoing drive to be more cost-effective is leading to investment in solutions like IP Telephony, e-marketing, ERP, sophisticated web sites and B2B integration.

iStart will run the survey annually and thanks all those that contributed to the results.

Below you can see investment intention across the different company size categories.

Overall results for employees 1 - 200+
Employees 1 - 5
Employees 6 - 20
Employees 21 - 50
Employees 50 - 200
Employees 200+

June 2005