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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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NYSIA NYC Information Technology Industry Survey Winter 2004 Summary | ||||||||||||||||
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About the Survey The NYSIA IT Industry Survey tracks employment and technology trends in the New York Area hi-tech industry. Respondents are asked to indicate the types of jobs they are hiring for or cutting back on, what operating systems and software tools are most important to them, and aspects of their business outlook. Our latest survey also polled respondents for their opinions on the very topical issue of outsourcing IT projects overseas. Previous NYSIA surveys were primarily designed to gather data pertaining to workforce development. The winter 2004 survey was revised to gather broader information on the state of the local industry, as well as to reflect the latest technologies and standardize the hiring categories. This summary compares current results with previous surveys in those instances where the questions are the same or similar. |
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| About the Respondents | ||||||||||||||||
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Small business is an important sector of the local hi-tech economy. 12% of the respondents who answered the question are one-person businesses
and 87% employ 25 people or less. About a third of the remaining 12% have 100 employees or more, with a great majority of those being IT-related
staff.
In terms of revenue, slightly less than half the respondents who answered the question brought in less than $500,000 in 2002 (the full calendar year prior to the start of the survey at the end of 2003). Of the rest, almost three quarters brought in between $500,000 and $2.5 million. Almost 48% of respondents indicated that they provide IT consulting services of various kinds - a significant line of business among NYSIA survey respondents. 23% are involved in developing software products and about 20% indicated being involved in some aspect of the Internet-related space. Just below 10% of respondents provide non-IT services such as financial, marketing, and design. | ||||||||||||||||
| Hiring or Firing? | ||||||||||||||||
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The hiring status index is computed as an average of all responses using -1 for reducing, 0 for stable, and +1 for hiring.
Hiring categories are adapted from the IT skills standard promulgated by the National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies.
Index range: -1.00 to +1.00.
Hiring statistics from our latest survey show encouraging gains, with the hiring index for IT-related employees as a whole bouncing back to .28, a level near the .29 recorded just prior to 9/11. This compares quite favorably to .18 in the winter 2003 survey and the low point of .12 in the winter 2002 survey. While our hiring categories have been revised for the latest survey, across-board-results for winter 2004 indicate a clear positive change in the hiring landscape versus winter 2003. This is more than apparent in certain significant categories that remain directly comparable between the two surveys:
Interestingly, while our responses indicate a significant resurgence of hiring for technology positions, the hiring status for staff as a whole was a rather soft .17 (actually lower than the .22 indicated by the winter 2003 survey). | ||||||||||||||||
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What's Hot, What's Not?
To gauge the popularity of software technologies, respondents were asked to rate the importance to their business of various operating systems, development tools and technical certifications. The indexes are an average of responses using 0 for not important, 1 for somewhat important, and 2 for very important. Index range: 0.00 to +2.00. In the battle of the operating systems, Windows servers took top honors with the highest importance index of 1.59. UNIX servers scored a respectable 1.11. Windows made a similarly (and predictably) strong showing in the workstation arena with an importance index of 1.45, well ahead of any rivals. Interestingly, UNIX scored as a slightly more important workstation operating system than MacOS, with an index of .63 versus .56 Windows 9x and ME continued to plummet in importance, dropping to a new low of .57 as companies are steadily adopting more efficient and stable Windows versions. The most up-to-date Microsoft operating systems all show strong acceptance, with importance indexes of 1.48 for Windows 2000, 1.45 for Windows XP and 1.38 for Windows 2003 Server. Linux, whose score had spiked slightly in the winter 2003 survey, maintains a respectable importance index of 1.02. In terms of development tools and technologies, the biggest change from previous surveys was in the realm of scripting and programming languages. JavaScript, perennially ranked as among the most important technologies, dropped precipitously f rom 1.51 to 1.18 since the winter 2003 survey. Likewise, Java dropped from 1.30 to 1.07 and C++ fell from 1.10 to .92. Microsoft development technologies, on the other hand, remained firm. SQL Server led the pack in importance at 1.41 (while Oracle fell to .94 from 1.08), .NET and ASP maintained similar or slightly higher scores compared to the previous year, and Visual Basic rose in importance from .59 to .99. |
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| Business Outlook | ||||||||||||||||
| Things are looking up. Fully 65% of respondents felt their business outlook had improved in the 6 months prior to the survey, while only 5% were less optimistic. Over 46% of respondents increased their IT budgets slightly or significantly in 2003 over 2002, while less than 11% experienced a slight to significant decrease. 53% expected to increase IT spending in 2004 versus 2003, while again less than 11% anticipated cutting back. Sentiment, spending and hiring all seem to be pointing in the direction of recovery. |
| Overseas Outsourcing | ||
| In the winter 2004 survey we decided to poll our constituency on the "hot issue" of overseas outsourcing of IT projects.
20% of respondents indicated that they outsource projects overseas. 15% expected to spend slightly more on offshore outsourcing in 2004 and over 7% expected to significantly increase offshore spending this year. While there seems to be a fair amount of outsourcing activity among the respondents, we didn't capture information that would enable us quantify it in dollar terms. Also, our data doesn't distinguish between principals versus consulting firms that have overseas programming teams. To gauge their views on the outsourcing debate, respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements about overseas outsourcing. An agreement index was computed for each statement as an average of responses using -2 for strongly disagree, -1 for disagree, 0 for neutral, 1 for agree, and 2 for strongly agree. Index range: -2.00 to +2.00. We identified a distinct group of statements that respondents tended to agree with:
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