Despite a 3.5% IT budget increase for 2011, CIOs in India are seeking "new lighter-weight technologies" such as cloud computing and SaaS.
IT leaders are also expecting a 67% increase in cloud adoption over the next four years, said research firm Gartner.
"CIOs and IT have been boxed in between modest budget growth and growing legacy requirements," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner Executive Programs.
Among the 36 top CIO's in India, representing $1.2 billion in CIO IT budgets, 53% have plans to increase spending, 42% are holding spending levels similar to last year and 5% are decreasing IT budgets in 2011.
"New lighter-weight technologies -- such as cloud computing, SaaS and social networks -- and IT models enable the CIO to redefine IT, giving it a greater focus on growth and strategic impact. These are two things that are missing from many organizations," he said.
"The resource realities indicated in the 2011 CIO Agenda Survey raise the urgency and importance of adopting new infrastructure and operations technologies, such as cloud services and mobile technologies [see Table 1 below]," said McDonald. "These technologies were selected by CIOs the most often and are the top-two technologies for 2011 and are well-suited for this budget reality, as they offer similar service levels at lower budget costs."
In India, CIOs expect to adopt new cloud services much faster than originally expected. Currently, no one reports having the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies, but over the next four years CIOs in India expect this number to increase to 67% or two out of three CIOs responding to the survey.