Manufacturing slump fails to hit IT spend

UK manufacturing may be in recession, but investment in IT continues to grow, especially for old faithfuls such as AS/400 and Unix, writes Joanne Wallen.

The annual Benchmark Research survey of 1,714 IT managers, published at this week?s Computers In Manufacturing show in Birmingham, confirmed that the AS/400 is thriving in the manufacturing industry.

Some 19% of manufacturers with more than 50 staff run their core business software on AS/400 systems, up from 12% last year.

In most cases this software is manufacturing resource planning or enterprise resource planning.

Unix systems have also gained growth, with 36% of manufacturers running on Unix, up from 33% last year.

Not to be left out, Windows NT also made up ground. The survey showed Windows NT systems in manufacturing have more than doubled this year, to 10% from 4% last year.

Manufacturing, which this year has come under intense pressure for lagging behind almost every other sector in its year 2000 compliance work, is also faring badly in making core systems euro compliant.

A quarter of companies are doing nothing and only 18% said their systems had been audited.