Good news, bad news and wrong news on IT spending

 I've got some good news for all you cloud service providers, security technology companies, storage suppliers, big data companies and those of you in the mobile industry: 2015 is going to be a bumper year.

"IT decision makers’ spending on security technologies will increase 46 percent in 2015, with cloud computing increasing 42 percent and business analytics investments up 38 percent. Enterprise investments in storage will increase 36 percent, and for wireless and mobile, 35 percent."

That at least what was said in this story on the web site of Forbes Magazine, a publishing house that claims "iconic status in the lexicon of American media."

That's the good news. The bad news is that the rest of IT is going to have a very tough time in 2015. The Forbes article also reported: "The average IT budget will increase by 4.3 percent in 2015."

The article cites as its source for this astonishing information research undertaken by IDG, publisher of Computerworld and numerous other IT magazines.

The truth is that this is a load of boloney. The author of the Forbes article misinterpreted IDG's report of its research. What IDG found was that 46 percent of respondents said that spending on security would increase in 2015, but not by what percentage. Similarly, 42 percent said spending on cloud would increase, and so on.

Trouble is, that error has been widely spread by numerous others who have picked up and quoted or referenced the Forbes report unquestioningly. I searched on the exact phrase of the Forbes article headline "Computerworld's 2015 Forecast Predicts Security, Cloud Computing And Analytics Will Lead IT Spending" and got 50 hits.

What's really astonishing is the lack of response by both Forbes and IDG to this error. On its web site Forbes offers an email address through which to submit corrections to its published articles. I did so, on 4 December. No response, on 15 December the article is still there unchanged.

I got a half-hearted response from IDG that acknowledged only one error, but IDG does not seem to have sufficiently concerned about the misrepresentation of its research to pursue Forbes and ensure that the error is corrected.

An IDG PR person responded to my email by saying: "I have reached out to Louis [Colombus, the author of the Forbes article] as that point of data was misinterpreted. Forty six percent of respondents anticipate their security budget will increase in the next year, but we did not collect by what percent."