Online consumer retail spending is booming and overall retail spending is going up compared to last year, yet compared to other industries, small to medium-sized retailers are remaining cautious about their technology spending, says the new State of IT in the SMB Market report from Forrester Research Inc.
Among small to medium-sized enterprises in five business sectors that Forrester surveyed, retailers and wholesalers had the lowest expectations of spending money on servers, storage and networking technology in the next year. 49% of retail/wholesale businesses expect to invest in servers or storage technology in the next year and 66% expect to invest in networking. On average among the five sectors, 74% of small to medium size businesses expect to invest in servers, 65% in storage and 75% in networking.
At the same time, though, a related Forrester survey—Better Prospects Ahead for SMB Spending—reports that retailers and wholesalers are generally optimistic about the state of their industry. Only 11% reported their industry as being weak. The only industry with a lower weak rating was finance and insurance, which 9% of executives characterized that way.
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