A lot of recent market research, such as Gartner's CIO survey predicting major global IT change, indicate that CIO priorities in 2009 will focus on enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, as well as business intelligence. Our question is how do these CIO priorities affect the rest of the IT organization?

To answer that question, we surveyed two different audiences: the first was 114 attendees at Interop New York in September, and the other was 99 attendees of IP'08, a conference on converged next generation networks that was held in October in London. The Interop attendees came primarily from the United States while the attendees at IP’08 came primarily from Europe. While there were some differences, their responses were remarkably similar.

Both audiences were asked if they expected their overall 2009 IT infrastructure budget would change. More than a third of both audiences said that it would increase while only 13% predicted a decline. When asked to indicate areas that would enjoy the biggest increases, the responses of both audiences were remarkably similar. Three areas that would experience the biggest budget increases for both audiences are virtualization, wireless LAN/WANs and WAN optimization.

We were not surprised that virtualization leads the list. Most of the interest we see relative to virtualization is focused on implementing virtualized servers. We realize that the economic situation has worsened since we gave the survey. However, given the cost savings that are typically associated with implementing virtualized servers, we expect that this will be an important initiative next year. If anything, its importance will increase if the economy situation worsens.

Next time, we'll continue the discussion of the areas of IT that we believe will grow in importance in 2009. We also want to hear from you. How is your IT organization responding to the challenging economic conditions? What initiatives are rising in importance? Which are declining in importance? In the meantime, more information on the topic can be found here.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.