Meanwhile, the general consensus of distributors and solution providers is that enterprise growth will be in the single digits. That's a vast improvement from this year where spending was flat, if not slightly down, and 2001, where spending was sharply lower. Kasper, a $500 million company, will increase IT spending by slightly less than 2 percent, bringing its IT budget in at $9 million. A key part of that budget will go to consolidating servers, deploying business-intelligence software from Information Builders to better monitor the performance of the business and integrating software using IBM's WebSphere suite.
Other executives also highlighted growing demand for bellwethers such as PCs and microprocessors. Ray Sadowski, senior vice president and CFO at Avnet, said Avnet has seen improvement in semiconductor sales. Sadowski also said his company's first-quarter fiscal 2004 results represented the largest year-over-year revenue increase,11 percent,in about three years, giving the distributor cause for optimism.
In addition to vendors and distributors, solution providers also chipped in some optimism. Dendy Young, chairman and CEO of GTSI, says the growth in government spending on IT has helped his company thrive. "The government market we're in doesn't have huge ups or downs. It just increases year-over-year, and that's a good market to be in," Young said. "We see a lot of pent-up demand [with the federal government] and no concern for the deficit."
In addition, Young said he saw growth with some of his top vendors, such as Sun Microsystems and Panasonic. Young also said his company has gotten a boost from the seasonal upturn in government spending on IT. "We do more business in the last day of September than we do in the entire month of January," he said. "It really is Christmas."
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