Because it's January and everyone's still in the "Best of '07/What's Hot in '08" mode, I thought I'd take a look at some trends in the three perennial "S" issues in the System i market and IT in general: spending, security, and storage. Although the sources of information come from outside our market, for the most part these definitely apply to the System i.

Despite being largely conducted before the latest U.S. recession scare became vogue, AMR Research released its annual report last week on IT spending for SMBs. AMR's encouraging word is that 64 percent of SMBs say they plan to increase IT spending in 2008, by an average of 5.3 percent. Plans are evenly split between companies planning to fund applications that simply help them run their businesses and companies that want applications to support innovation and spur growth. The largest single application type being planned, cited by 18 percent of respondents, was customer-management applications, with business-intelligence and business performance-management apps second and third.