Larry Dignan is reporting from Gartner ITxpo in Orlando.
Last night, Peter Sondergaard said "The worst case is that IT budgets will be down 2.5 percent." Today, Jorge Lopez paints a much more depressing view including using the depressing Depression word.
My take:
Peter and Jorge are two of Gartner's best, but unless production has become much more real-time since I was there, most of their slides were finalized 2-3 weeks ago. They have obviously been tweaked to reflect the amazing economic events of the last couple of weeks, but Gartner has not had a chance to survey its customer base, or indeed even take a detailed pulse of its own analysts.
So assign a probability of 0.2 to either Gartner scenario.
Give them a few weeks and you will get a nice, coherent view. Gartner research is always better with time and after its analysts challenge each other. That takes time.
