Bank of America published last week the results of a survey that it conducted with 100 enterprise CIOs or decision makers about their expected IT expenditures over the next 12 months.  The findings were published on Forbes.com and indicate that roughly 70% of the respondents are forecasting their applications budgets to go up within the next year.  The main application categories expected to benefit from the rise in enterprise software spending are business intelligence, compliance and financial management.  

Other Wall Street firms confirm the optimism in IT expenditures.  Earlier this year, Merrill Lynch analysts announced their forecast for global IT budgets, pegging the growth this year at the 2-3% range.  All these numbers show that the malaise that affected the sector in the past couple of years seems to be finally waning.