, also noted a 9.1% increase in spending on the IT work force, which it saw as the driver of the 6% overall tech spending number.

Maven Wave said it had anticipated the smaller 3% rise in Q2 because a Q1 surge of 14% had led them to believe that companies would be cutting back purchases to absorb what they had brought in earlier in the year.

More unexpected strength was seen in the better-than-anticipated hardware sales, especially, with actual results outperforming the projection by 5.3%. These positives, it said, were more than enough to offset weaker-than-expected software sales results. Software sales in Q2 fell short of projections by 4.9%.

The tech results were based on last week's release of .