Still, software spending will grow by 6.6% in 2009 to $244.3 billion, Gartner predicts, revising downward its previous forecast of 9.5% growth. Companies will delay or even cancel SOA projects, but software aimed at optimizing how organizations are run, such as business process management and master data management will fare better, Gartner says.

Scores of pundits also are predicting growth in cloud computing. IDC goes so far as to say will acquire Salesforce.com or another software-as-a-service applications ecosystem -- and that will be thinking about doing the same.

On the equipment side, wired switch port sales will decline for the first time in history, predicts Yankee Group. The research firm links the decline not to the economy, however, but to the popularity of wireless networks: "The acceleration of wireless LAN deployments will cause a slowdown, and ultimately a decline, in wired network switch port sales by the end of 2009," Yankee Group suggests.

Also set to decline for the first time since 2001 is the mobile phone market, which ABI Research estimates will shrink between 3% and 5%. "Replacement rates will be squeezed, and new subscriber adoption in emerging markets will slow perceptibly, resulting in a tough year for mass market handset vendors," the firm projects.

Meanwhile, after years of being regarded as the "ugly stepchild" of unified communications (UC), video is poised to take off in 2009, says Yankee Group, which predicts that video-enabled business processes will be born in 2009.