Good news in a challenging economy.

XO Communications just released an independent study on telecommunication and IT spending for 2009. Here are some of the report's findings:

Despite the worldwide economic crisis, the outlook for networking is relatively positive as companies look to telecommunications as a path to surviving -- and even thriving -- in these turbulent times. Overall, telecommunications will see some negative impact, but telecommunication services budgets are remaining essentially at existing levels. This is most likely due to an increase in dependence on networking functions as part of the business processes, and may especially be due to an increase in the use of managed services.

Key Findings
In November of 2008, as the impact of current economic conditions became clear, the worldwide Webtorials community was invited to participate in a survey concerning their companies' economic outlook for 2009. While the User base was the primary focus for the survey, additional perspectives were considered as well.*

There are two goals of this document. First, it is intended to provide Enterprise network C-Levels, planners and administrators with a baseline to compare their plans with those of their colleagues, In particular, this should be helpful in obtaining approval for additional funding as needed. Secondly, it is intended to help reinforce methods by which networking technology can be used to redefine business processes to increase/preserve profitability.

• While there will be a negative impact on 2009 telecommunications budgets, this impact is not expected to be severe, and over one-third of the companies expect no impact or some degree of increased funding. Overall, a quantitative index for Users showed the anticipated impact to be halfway between "no impact" and a "moderate negative impact."
• Companies will be dependent on telecommunications more than ever, but there will be little additional funding (or, overall, a decrease in funding) to support both ongoing and new initiatives.
• Funding for telecommunications services and staff salaries will be the least affected of the areas about which the respondents were queried. These two subcategories will, for all practical purposes, see no significant change.
  

The bottom line from the above-mentioned trends is that the effective use of telecommunications networks will not only be a key component in surviving the current economic conditions, but effective use can actually allow a company to thrive in these conditions.

For a complete copy of the report, please e-mail me at vbrauckman@telecoworks.com.

*In addition to users who are actively involved in the on-going planning and operation of their networks, we also solicited responses from the broader base of individuals who were representative of the portion of the Webtorials base that comes from within the industry. Overall, there were 300 respondents to at least a part of the survey and almost 250 responded tot he entire survey. Of the users responding to the survey, the distribution by company size (in number of employees) was 1-00, 11%; 100-149, 19%; 500-999, 8%; 1,000 - 4,999, 22%; 5,000-9,999, 8%; 10,000-49,999, 14%; 50,000 or more, 18%.