Of 150 IT professionals interviewed so far from a group of 250, 40% say they expect more funds in 2010 than this year, and another 40% say they expect flat funding, according to The Info Pro's director of networking and information security research Bill Trussell. About 20% expect spending declines.

Some say that any increased spending is due to making up for network refreshes that were planned but nixed this year and cannot wait another year, Trussell says. Some are stuck with network gear that is no longer supported and others have increased demands that require higher speed equipment, he says.

Earlier upgrades in certain aspects of a network may have an impact on other areas, forcing other spending. For instance, virtualization projects may increase demand at sites whose firewalls are now inadequate to handle increased traffic.

is one area where spending has kept a constant pace between 2008 and 2009, Trussell says. It is proving its worth as an element of improved application performance and a way to reduce WAN bandwidth needs or at least defer bandwidth increases.

Trussell says he expected to see an increase in demand for 10Gbps Ethernet switching based on higher core traffic levels due to larger data centers. "There's no data to support that," he says. "We haven’t seen with virtualization rollouts that this is coming to fruition."