Around two-fifths of Western European organizations plan to increase their spend on external IT services in 2012, one in seven plan to cut that spend, and the remaining two-fifths indicate that their IT services budgets will be static in 2012. These spending plans are similar to enterprises' actual spending patterns for 2011 but are less bullish.

"Essentially, 2012 won't be significantly worse in IT services spending terms than 2011. For vendors, the year will simply be more of the same, only worse. While having two-fifths of end-user organizations expecting to increase their IT services spending sounds bullish, bear in mind that the vast majority of these organizations expect spending increases of less than 5%," said Douglas Hayward, research director, European Services. "Are end users they being realistic with their 2012 budgets? We think so, and we don't anticipate a major downward revision of budgets in the second half of 2012. But the wildcard would be a catastrophic macroeconomic/political event such as the breakup of the eurozone — if that happens, all bets would be off."