Hardware budget of mainland midsize firms stay the same

The economic crisis is having a more limited impact on China's IT hardware industry compared to other countries, said Gartner Tuesday.

More than 70 percent of mid-size enterprises (with between 100-999 staffers) surveyed in China in June and July this year have maintained their hardware budgets at the same level as prior to the downturn, or have even increased their hardware budget, compared to around 50 percent of large enterprises surveyed, said Gartner.

The survey asked respondents to identify significant drivers of investment in their organization for 2009-2010. The key drivers were in order of priority: developing new business and/or new products, creating a paperless environment and improving customer satisfaction, the analyst house noted.

"In general, mid-size enterprises, just like the younger generation, are more energetic and flexible than large enterprises, especially when it comes to reacting to market changes and allocation of capital investment," said Gartner research vice president Jennifer Wu. "They grasp and invest in any business opportunity to make money, even when the risks are high."

Wu said that mid-size enterprises (MSEs) in China expect to see an immediate pay-off on their IT investments.

"Today's MSEs may be tomorrow's large enterprises. On the road to success, today's Chinese MSEs realize how important and necessary it is to increase and maintain customer satisfaction," said Wu. "This implies that increasingly, in addition to investment in IT hardware, businesses are keen to invest in software solutions such as customer relationship management as well as after sales IT services and so forth."

Green IT is gradually gaining attention within MSEs with 14 percent of respondents having already invested and 17 percent planning to invest in green IT in 2009, said Gartner, adding that China's CIOs have taken the simplest or fastest route to meet green IT objectives such as better PC life cycle management and reselling surplus PCs, reducing office paper consumption, improving storage utilisation and switching to more power-efficient servers.