"I think [SaaS] is always going to be more pricey than doing it ourselves, but we will see," said Everett, who is also looking at increased IT automation as a potential cost-saving option.
Not everyone is cutting back. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, said during a Q&A keynote session at the Gartner conference that he plans to increase the networking vendor's IT spending by 10 percent next year, regardless of what happens to the economy. Economic slowdowns can be used to "gain huge competitive advantage" by companies that see IT as "the enabler of business strategy," Chambers said.
After the keynote session and in interviews conducted with IT managers near TV monitors that showed a CNN report on yet another Wall Street sell-off, it was impossible to find anyone as enthusiastic as Chambers about the potential for moving ahead so aggressively on IT investments.
But harsh economic conditions may make possible some IT actions that were off the table in more flush times. For instance, John McLatchey, an enterprise architecture planner at a health care company that he asked not be identified, said the thinking in his group is to try to push through changes that may have been politically difficult before, such as getting rid of legacy systems that are expensive to maintain. "Let's use this as an opportunity," he said, describing the internal view.
Miguel Gascon, CIO at Global Bank, is taking a much more basic step -- one that goes to the heart of the new financial cautiousness. Gascon said he plans to make invoice verification a higher priority in his department, in order to make sure that IT vendors' bills are correct and meet the terms of their contracts.