MUMBAI: Indian CIOs expect IT budgets to increase by seven percent in 2005, significantly higher than the 2005 global average of 2.5 percent. According to the global CIO survey by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP), Indian IT spend is mainly driven by security and data protection, business continuity and business growth.

Indian CIOs are clearly focused towards building a solid foundation for longer-term performance boost to their enterprise, whereas CIOs in other parts of the world are more concerned with short-term results. As per the survey findings, Indian CIO efforts are concentrated on protecting quality of earnings - that is long-term reliability - rather than just automating business for the sake of it.

According to VP and research director for Gartner EXP, Andrew Rowsell-Jones, "They are not only investing in IT to gain competitive advantage for their enterprises, they are also investing in business process improvement initiatives, which will drive up enterprise efficiency. IT is seen as delivering short-term and long-term gains. This is a good news story for IT in India."

According to Gartner, there exists in India a solid underpinning on enterprise wide operating costs to ensure business costs don't get out of line. But the rest of the world ranks enterprise-wide operating costs more strongly.