We have just wrapped up two major surveys of organizational decision makers - one with midsized and large organizations and the other with small to midsized businesses. Included in the surveys for both groups were the following questions:

* What will be the impact of the current economic problems on your 2009 IT budget plans: will your IT budget be lower, the same or higher than it was in 2008?

* How would you have answered this question in June 2008?

First, the bad news. Not surprisingly, nearly one-half of decision makers told us that their 2009 IT budget will be lower than it was in 2008 given the current economic climate. However, one in five decision makers also told us that if they had answered this question in June of this year, they would also have responded that their 2009 IT budget would be lower.

Now, the good news. Slightly more than one-half of decision makers told us that their 2009 IT budget will be the same as it was in 2008 or will actually increase. Had decision makers answered this question in June, almost four out of five would have responded this way.

Clearly, the current economic problems being experienced worldwide will have an impact on many aspects of IT spending, particularly for non-critical expenditures like operating system upgrades, migration to new desktop productivity applications and the like. We do not expect spending on critical investments to diminish much, if at all. This includes spending on Web threat management, antispam and anti-malware technologies, data loss prevention systems, archiving for legal and regulatory compliance, and the like.

Just a reminder that I will be writing only one more newsletter for Network World. If you’d like to sign up to receive my new newsletter at MessagingWire, which will be focused on messaging, unified communications, collaboration and related issues, you can do so here.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.