Retailers upbeat about industry, but cautious about tech spending

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.