Tech spending projections were up in September, according to the monthly CIO Magazine Tech Poll released Monday.

The CIOs surveyed by the magazine said they believe their IT budgets will grow by 9.3 percent over the next year, up from the 7.1 percent growth rate CIOs projected in August.

"That makes it two out of three months that we"re pretty strong," said Gary Beach, group publisher at CXO Media Inc. "It"s the best three-month rolling forecast going into a new year that we"ve had in four years. So that"s encouraging, and it"s in sync with what I hear when I chat with CIOs -- that infrastructure investment, which was not a high priority for these folks over the past couple of years because it"s costly and they"ve had budgets that have been muted, went up fairly significantly month to month."

This is the first time in a while that projected spending on both infrastructure and e-business software have gone up fairly significantly, he said.

Spending projections also increased from the prior month in computer hardware, telecommunications equipment, storage systems and outsourced IT services, Beach said.

As in recent months, Beach said he remains most concerned about the IT labor supply.

"Twenty percent of the CIOs are still saying IT labor is hard to find and keep," he said. "That will continue to be a cause of concern as corporate earnings improve and businesses once again want to turn to IT to change the business. [The question is,] Will there be enough labor available to build the security stuff, the network infrastructure, the stuff that will never be outsourcing? That"s reflected in the fact that compensation increases for the next 12 months continue to be over 6 percent."

But the big takeaway from the September survey is that CIOs continue to believe they"re going to see a bigger increase in spending in 2006 than they have in the past four years, Beach said.