EMC’s CEO & CFO on Where CIO’s Will Be Spending Their IT Budgets

Last year was a very turbulent year for IT spending. Most companies were trying to reduce their costs and weren’t spending cash on their IT infrastructure until the dust settled from the great recession of 2009. Luckily, the tech industry tends to rebound fairly quickly from recessions because it plays such a critical role in the business functions of Fortune 1000 companies. Without maintaining and innovating their IT infrastructure, companies are at a competitive disadvantage, and it can start to affect their revenues and customer satisfaction.

EMC is one of the largest sellers of enterprise IT software and hardware and they have been an industry leader in developing innovate technology for decades and have weathered many recessions. In January 2010 they released their quarter four earnings report and their CEO, Joe Tucci, had a lot of commentary on where he thinks companies will start to spend their 2010 IT budgets.

He stated the number one priority for CIOs in 2010 is storage. CIOs will use a significant portion of their budgets to optimize their storage systems and methods including back-up disks with data de-duplication, storage consolidation, unified storage, tiering of storage, and business continuity. Companies’ data requirements are increasing every second and their valuable data needs to backed up and secure. Data storage initiatives will accelerate throughout the next decade, and cloud computing will be a major player in the data storage industry.

Virtualization is another area that Tucci identifies as somewhere that CIOs will be spending their budgets. Virtualization decreases the amount of physical hardware and redistributes how networks and computers are allocated across the infrastructure. It reduces company costs and increases the efficiency of their IT systems. Along the same lines as virtualization, he sees security and governance, risk, and compliance spending accelerating in 2010. EMC is increasing their development of private clouds and are working with Fortune 1000 companies to redistribute their data centers using virtualization. All of this is great news for IT sellers trying to penetrate Fortune 1000 companies this year.

EMC’s CFO Daivd Goulden also commented on how spending started to increase in Q4 of 2009, “I think we also saw even maybe a little extra in some of that spending the customers didn’t do in Q1 and Q2 as companies got more confident in their next year 2010 business plans, they were doing a little bit of catch-up because I think they really starved their infrastructures in Q1 and Q2,” he said.

Now is the time to identify your prospects using sales intelligence resources and start forecasting your sales pipeline for 2010. Sales reps can’t rest on the laurels of 2009; they must identify current company problems and opportunities and then communicate how their solutions can help them leave the low points of 2009 behind.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 118