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CIOs Cheerier About Future Spending

Chief information officers in the U.S. are surprisingly optimistic about the future and think IT spending will climb nearly seven percent in 2005, a research firm said Monday.

Forrester Research, which polls North American CIOs each quarter, cited numbers that indicate enterprise IT leaders are more confident than earlier in 2004. For the first time in the past three quarters, said Tom Pohlmann, research director at Forrester, a majority of the surveyed CIOs (52 percent) said that their industry business climate was at "strong" or "very strong." In the first quarter, that number was only 36 percent.

"That's a surprising jump," said Pohlmann. "Pretty much everyone is optimistic about the future. For these IT pros, the future's not as bad as all the negative media news, about, say, oil prices, or some software vendors posting poor earnings."

Conversely, only 17 percent of the CIOs polled said that the business climate was "challenging" in the third quarter, down by almost half from the 31 percent who saw doom and gloom in the first quarter.

On average, the CIOs surveyed thought that their IT spending would climb 6.4 percent in 2005, on pace with Forrester's own earlier estimate of a 7 percent increase in spending next year.

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