When asked about the key challenges facing them in the coming year, the technology decision makers cited "meeting the same or similar objectives with lower IT budgets". To address these challenges, 84% of respondents in enterprises and 77% of mid-market companies stated the most important area requiring support from technology providers was

Next big thing: Virtualization

Asked about nine technology trends would impact the industry most over the next five years, virtualization was overwhelmingly the top choice with 54% of respondents choosing it. The trends also included web-oriented architectures (44%); unified communications (35%); social software and social networking (34%); business intelligence (32%); green IT (31%); cloud computing (30%); specialized systems/appliances (17%); other (1%).

In small companies, Web-oriented architectures was considered to be the major trend.

"I don't think I was surprised to see virtualization up there, but I was surprised to see it so far ahead in enterprise organizations [69% in enterprises compared to 24% in small companies]," Ingledew said. "Within context of what's going on in the economy it makes a lot of sense because organizations are trying to do more with less. They're trying to eek out every thing they can from there existing infrastructure."