Greenspan and IT: Are we facing another recession?

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is hitting the airwaves promoting his new book, but his comments in recent interviews about the possibility of a recession might be scarier to IT folks than anything in the new tome.

Greenspan, who has become a Federal Reserve chairman emeritus of sorts, might be more objective now that he is out of his federal role. He told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thought the probability of a recession is “slightly more than a third,” up from merely a third, as he put it earlier this year.

For IT professionals and CEOs of major software and hardware vendors, the prospect of a recession any time soon is downright daunting, given that memories of the 2001-2002 dot-com bust are still fresh.

If housing price declines and the troubles with home mortgage lenders precipitate a longer economic downturn in the next year, the effect could roughly halve the 12-year cycle many economists track for upturns and downturns, some observers noted yesterday.

“I’m certainly concerned with the housing downturn,” said IT market analyst Jason Sajko, who studies government spending on IT for consulting firm Input. “But I don’t see that creating something like what we felt in 2001 and 2002 so soon after then. I don’t think we’ll see an impact of that magnitude.”

Sajko and Input do frequent analysis of federal, state, and local spending on IT products and services. A month ago, Input said it was still projecting strong growth in state and local government spending in the United States on IT products and services into 2012, increasing from $43.9 billion in 2007 to $67.2 billion in 2012. That analysis was able to track the impact of the general economy, including the news in the last six months over housing market problems.

In a small update to that analysis yesterday, Sajko said that state and local governments are also beginning to use a new catalog of IT vendors and prices called Schedule 70 provided by the U.S. General Services Administration. The GSA provides the catalog as a resource to thousands of state and local IT purchasing managers, Sajko explained.

For Schedule 70, growth in IT spending among local and state governments will increase nearly 25 percent a year to 2012, exceeding $1 billion.

While $1 billion is a small portion of the total spending in that category, it shows primarily a shift in the way spending will be done, not so much the overall level of spending related to the larger IT economy, Sajko said. Still, state and local spending on IT can be seen as a “more stable” area for IT spending in coming years than others, Sajko said.

Several CEOs in recent days have said in interviews with Computerworld that they are carefully watching the direction of the general economy. They said they learned from the dot-com bust to adapt their products to the most successful market segments in order to weather downturns.

For example, Maria Ligeti, CEO of startup React Systems in Roseville, Calif., said yesterday she has profited from observing the IT industry’s upturns and downturns in Silicon Valley for more than 20 years while working in various roles. A new product and service her company is launching soon in emergency communications will be marketed to several vertical industry segments. She said the offerings have been fostered over several months by early adopters, she said.

“We think we’ll be somewhat immune” if there’s a downturn, she said with confidence.