科技行业新年处境堪忧

    除非总体经济强劲复苏的前景更加明朗，否则这些公司可能仍然难以走出衰退的困境。不过，在一片惨淡当中，2013年的科技开支也有一些好消息。比如，并非整个行业都将陷入萧条，因为各大公司还是愿意在一些关键的增长领域加大开支。

    招聘公司Teksystems调查了600名IT经理，结果发现，仅有48%计划增加2013年的IT预算（其他受访者将削减开支或保持在2012年的水平）。但尽管如此，云服务、存储与平板设备等领域却出现了不成比例的增长。高德纳与弗雷斯特同样预测这些领域将出现强劲增长。

    关键在于，这些领域之所以成为IT开支的热点，很大程度上是由于它们有助于节省总成本。平板设备销量激增是因为其价格仅是台式机或笔记本电脑的一小部分，而云服务则可以帮助公司减少维护和更新专有软件套件的开支。而这些情况意味着，除非2013年总体经济能有出人意料的强劲表现，否则对于许多IT产品与服务以及整个IT支出而言，明年又将是艰难的一年。（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    Until the prospect of a stronger economic recovery becomes evident, they are likely to keep languishing. For all that gloom, however, there is some good news for tech spending in 2013. Not all of the sluggish growth will be across the board, with companies willing to spend in a few key areas of growth.

    Recruiting firm Teksystems surveyed more than 600 IT managers and found that while only 48% of them were planning on increasing their IT budgets in 2013 (with the rest cutting budgets or keeping it the same as in 2012), some areas like the cloud, storage and tablets will see disproportionate growth. Gartner and Forrester also saw strong growth in these areas.

    The catch is, these hot spots of IT spending are popular in large part because they can add to overall cost savings. Tablet sales are surging because they can be bought at a fraction of the cost of a desktop or laptop PC and cloud services can help companies avoid spending on the maintenance and upgrading of proprietary software suites. Which means that barring an unexpectedly strong global economy in 2013, the coming year for many IT products and services—and for IT spending in general—is shaping up to be another tough one.