New survey points to continued weakness in IBM spending intentions

Investing.com -- Bernstein's May/June survey of 100 U.S. and European CIOs found net spending intentions remain "deeply negative" for IBM and continuing to deteriorate, even as overall CIO expectations for IT spending stayed broadly constructive.

Analyst Mark Newman said Bernstein forecasts 2026 IT spending growth in line with Gartner's estimated 12%, noting sentiment has diverged regionally, with European CIOs becoming more pessimistic than their American counterparts.

The firm said IT spending has historically shown a positive correlation with GDP and corporate earnings growth, which has improved to 24.4% versus 15.3% last November.

Cybersecurity software remained the top spending priority for CIOs, followed by GenAI and storage. Bernstein said spending intentions remain weakest for traditional infrastructure categories, including x86 servers, mainframes and printers, with mainframe sentiment "negative overall and broadly stable" versus the November survey, and only 14% of mainframe users intending to add capacity.

Across vendors, Bernstein said spending intentions remain polarized, with IBM alongside HP Inc. and HPE showing deeply negative net spending intentions, though HP and HPE were both improving.

Dell continued to fare better than its infrastructure peers and also improved versus prior surveys. Apple was the only vendor to achieve non-negative net spending intentions when CIOs were asked about hardware and infrastructure spending over the next five years.

In cloud and software, Bernstein said Microsoft, Amazon and ServiceNow ranked highest, with Microsoft and OpenAI viewed as the leading long-term AI platforms.

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