There's always next year. A new Wedbush survey reported on by ZDNet suggests that IT managers will have deeper pockets in 2011, and stalled projects will start to get off the ground. The survey of 100 IT management decision makers found that: 

Sixty-six percent of IT execs say that implementation of new software platforms were critical, up from 47 percent in the second quarter survey. SaaS, collaboration, HR and ERP projects are all in demand and rated high priority projects. Potential winners: Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, Oracle, and SAP.

Forty-seven percent are upgrading to the latest Microsoft Exchange and 23 percent are rolling out partial deployments. The big reason is Exchange support for multiple devices.

Network deployments such as security, routing/switching, collaboration and performance management are all rated a top priority. Video and voice collaboration were also seen as critical projects by 61 percent of respondents. Winners may include Cisco and Polycom on that front.

52 percent said that shifting data warehouse projects to appliance deployments was a big priority. Oracle's Exadata machine was rated a high priority by 45 percent of respondents.

Each one of these bullet points hints at possible IT employment trends in the coming months. As always, networking, virtualization, and cloud-based implementations seem to be top of mind for IT going into 2011.

 -- Don Willmott