Comparing their IT CAPEX this year with the last two years, Quiat revealed that "it is a lot smaller because of the one time payment for the SAP license and implementation costs for the past two years."

Quiat also attributed the lowering of their operating expense budget to IT manpower reduction. "I decided not to replace two IT senior staff who resigned last year because maintaining the SAP system is much simpler compared with our legacy systems."

For the 29% of the respondents who expect their budgets to remain unchanged from the previous year's, the need to adopt a more cautious strategy to counteract the uncertainties that affect the business conditions is important for managing IT costs.

Apart from this, some of their IT projects were already done and implemented the previous year as revealed by Xavier Lucas, an IT manager of Holy Cow Animation, Inc., who said, "Our major IT projects were already implemented last year. We have pending projects but this will be on a case to case basis depending on our clients' project demands."