According to a new survey by the research house, more than 50 percent of the large organizations surveyed in China have maintained their hardware budgets at the same level as prior to the downturn, or have even increased their hardware budget.
When changes were made, budgets for servers and storage remained relatively stable while budgets for PCs and printers were more likely to be reduced, said Gartner, adding that more than 70 percent of organizations maintained the same budget in 2009 as they had in 2008 for server and storage.
The Gartner survey found that large Chinese organizations still appear fairly confident of internal conditions and are prepared to continue investing in IT, despite the global economic downturn.
The survey asked respondents to identify significant drivers of investment in their organization for 2009. The key drivers were in order of priority: improving operational efficiency, improving employee productivity followed by reducing operational costs, said Gartner.
"China remains a relatively buoyant market for IT vendors who can help IT users to achieve greater efficiency and productivity while reducing costs," said Jennifer Wu, Gartner research vice president.
"China's IT users are ready to invest in technologies that are shown to increase productivity and improve efficiency. In particular, server and storage capacity as a service are gaining higher interest, especially in the banking industry where it has been proven to reduce the cost of storage and reduce the total cost of ownership," she noted.
The survey also revealed that 24 percent of Chinese organizations have increased their budgets for green IT in 2009. Garter defines green IT as the optimal use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for managing the environmental sustainability of enterprise operations and the supply chain, as well as that of its products, services and resources, throughout their life cycles.
Organizations have started to establish measures to protect the environment and are willing to pay for it, said the research firm. In the area of green printing solutions and techniques, for example, this can not only enhance efficiency and achieve significant cost reduction, but also reduce ecological impact, through tactics such as duplex printing, power management and supplies management, Gartner added.