IT managers head for Internet

Hot issues for IT managers in 1998 will be a familiar litany of exploiting Internet technology, fixing the millennium bug and deploying ever more Windows NT, according to a survey of IT users published this week.

But the sunny picture of rising IT expenditure is clouded by the worrying admission that a handful of companies (3.5%) expect to miss the year 2000 deadline for completing the bug fix. And a sizable minority ? 30% ? of organisations are pushing the deadlines into 1999.

However, the majority of the 410 users surveyed by the National Computing Centre expect total IT budgets on average to increase by 10% in 1998. And two-thirds of IT shops expect their budgets to rise this year ? if not by 10% then by some by some lesser amount. Only 15% are slated for a fall.

Deployment of Windows NT ? both on the client and server sides ? is expected to march relentlessly on.

Users anticipate it to start catching up Windows 95 as the client platform of choice by 1999 ? posting a 38% market share against 45% for 95.

Yet the massive growth for NT is expected on the server side, with the total number rising by a factor of three and a half times. The NT growth will be at the expense of Novell?s NetWare, and Unix is expected to continue to maintain its position.

? Report by Dan Sabbagh.