Friday, September 9, 2011

Blog

IT still the little big man in Mass.

By James M. Connolly

The joke during the depths of the recession was “flat is the new up.” If revenue, profits, hiring or whatever you measure wasn’t in negative territory, you stretched your arm just as far as it would go and patted yourself on the back.

So, accepting that nobody has found a path back to boom times, this week’s muddy news on information technology spending should have folks here in Massachusetts shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Beats gettin’ poked in the eye with a sharp stick.” The news from CIO magazine is that IT investments nationwide are “stable.” CIO’s survey of 181 heads of IT showed that almost half are maintaining their IT spending plans even with the economic turmoil of the past month.

Why do we care here? Because, even though the sprawling campuses of computer hardware companies are long gone and once high-flying PC software companies have been absorbed by industry giants, IT still means jobs in the Bay State. Just as the transportation sector monitors oil prices and retailing cares about consumer spending, everyone in Massachusetts has a stake — or at least a family connection — in IT.

It’s easy to underestimate the state’s IT sector for a few reasons. First, a lot of the jobs are in big companies that aren’t headquartered here. Think thousands of jobs at IBM in the Westford-Littleton area and Cisco in Boxborough. Also, the IT sector is highly fragmented. For every big, local company like EMC or Nuance, there are dozens of small but successful IT-oriented firms with 10, 20 or 100 employees. That cloud storage startup is next door to a 40-year-old telecom hardware company, and both will find a home for their products in someone’s data center.

That fact that IT spending is stable may not be the best news, but it can provide some degree of comfort for all of the people in these varied companies, particularly when you drill down into the numbers. Where there are cuts, IT executives say they will most likely come in IT consulting and travel. Staff headcounts, training and salaries are most likely to remain stable or grow. In addition, the technology purchases that feed so many Bay State residents don’t appear on the chopping block. In fact, new investments are most likely to come in cloud computing, business intelligence and analytics, hardware infrastructure, tablets, and mobile/wireless. With the exception of tablets, all of those technologies represent areas where local companies excel.

Finally, IT companies aren’t just about engineers and developers. They have their lawyers, HR people, sales reps, cafeteria workers and other non-IT employees, and all of those people spend money in their community. So, next time you think things are in the crapper for everyone, hug a programmer. They’re helping to keep us going, and most of them actually do bathe.