LONDON, UK: IDC's European storage survey tells of a market shift towards tactical spending, though cuts less likely for storage than other areas of IT.

Storage was far less likely to experience spending cuts during these difficult economic times than other technologies such as PCs, printers, servers, and networking equipment. IDC's EMEA storage research team outlined this finding and announced the completion of its seventh annual storage survey, entitled: 'IDC's Annual European Storage Survey: Understanding: User Needs in a Changing Economic Climate'.

Deteriorating economic environments were causing many storage managers to rethink how they spend their budgets. Companies were most likely to deal with economic downturns by:

Freezing spending related to new projects
Switching to lower-cost technology, or
Increasing the approvals needed for spending decisions

Eric Sheppard, program manager for IDC's EMEA storage research, said: ''Changing economic conditions and new technologies such as server and storage virtualization are clearly altering the way European storage managers design and deploy their storage infrastructure. Our survey suggests that the current economic conditions will result in a short-term shift towards tactical spending on storage, while rising adoption of server virtualisation is driving new interest in advanced features provided by storage virtualisation offerings.''

Source: IDC