Sixty-six per cent of 467 chief information officers surveyed by IDC India revealed that they expect the economic slowdown to end by October-December 2009.

However, in view of the larger macro-economic picture and the lag in terms of IT buying by enterprises,IDC India expects the slowdown to extend and IT spending to revive after the second quarter (April-June) of calendar year 2010.

The study was conducted across 467 CIOs from mid-sized and large enterprises across 18 industry verticals in February-March 2009.

The CIOs said their focus is shifting to better management of existing IT infrastructure by consolidating, optimising and leveraging resources from building new capacities.

The economic slowdown is accelerating enterprise transformation, which is manifested in cost savings, productivity enhancement customer retention and new IT engagement/delivery models, according to the study titled "Identifying Opportunities in the Current Economic Scenario".

The CIOs said green technologies like virtualization unified communications and others like business intelligence and data warehousing, software-as-a-service, and open source are the emerging investment priorities in 2009.