And a systems engineer at a major national retail chain, who also asked that he not be identified, said his company has scaled back on some smaller IT projects but is continuing to proceed on major initiatives. He added that he was at the conference to find out more about technologies that the retailer wants to pursue to save money and increase operating efficiencies. Included among them was virtualization. "We're already doing it," the systems engineer said. "We're looking at how we can do it better."

Money has been budgeted for that work, but increasing the amount if needs expand likely would be a hard sell internally, according to the systems engineer. "You're going to have to justify going beyond that budget," he said. "You'll get to sit before the review committee and justify it. That's not going to be fun."