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February 18, 2010 - Instead of purchasing new software, more than half of nearly 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers from Forrester's Business Data Services survey say they will be spending IT budgets on the operation and maintenance of existing applications in 2010. The fastest-growing small to midsized software markets will be customer relationship management or information and knowledge management, more than 20 percent of all SMBs have concrete plans to implement these in 2010 or later.

According to Forrester’s findings, the poor economic environment created a backlog of business application software upgrade activities for firms, and many plan to address the issue this year. Forty-one percent of enterprises and 21 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade existing finance and accounting software, 48 percent of enterprises and 19 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade their CRM applications, and 52 percent of enterprises and 18 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade industry-specific software.

"CIOs should not only cut costs in their IT organization," says Forrester Senior Analyst Stefan Reid. "Eventually IT investment can enable cost cutting or growth in the core business."

Information Management recently covered news on IT personnel budgets, global IT spending and addressing new service requests.

Valerie Valentine is senior editor for Information Management. You can follow her on Twitter @ValValentineIM.