COMMON Europe Updates Top Concerns i Budget Data

August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In my analysis of the preliminary Top Concerns data coming out of a survey done by COMMON Europe, I noted that on the budgetary data, the European IBM i user group had mixed customer, business partner, and IBM survey response data together when what it should have done is just look at the customer data. They are the ones cutting the checks on Power Systems iron, after all.

As it turns out, taking out the IBM and business partner data did not change the budgetary picture all that much, which is a coincidence of unusual proportions. Take a look:

The top row of data, underneath the yellow bar, shows the budget ups and downs and flats for all 525 people who participated in COMMON Europe’s Top Concerns survey, which spanned the globe. The bottom set of data, underneath the blue bar, shows the data when customers and business partners are included but responses from IBM are pulled out of the data. The dataset under the green bar is just for the 343 customers who responded to the survey.

As you can see, the customer-only data moves one point into the stable operating expense budget and out of the decreasing budget column, which is good news, and moves one point into the capital expense increasing response rate from the stable CapEx budget response, which is also good news. It is also noise in the data as far as I can tell.

As to why BPs and IBM are mirroring customer budget expectations, this makes sense for the BPs, since they live and die on customer budget increases. I would have though IBM was immune from such concerns, with its budgets spanning so many platforms and services, but apparently not.