While on Wall Street, banks were collapsing, IT pros were in New York as well for Interop.

We were a bit concerned, what with the economic downturn and all, as to what would happen with spending in IT in the upcoming year. So NetQoS ran a survey polling 112 respondents who attended Interop New York about how much they would spend on network management disciplines and other IT initiatives in 2009.

Here’s what we found.

A plurality of respondents, 46 percent, said that their spending on network management disciplines would stay the same. Only 15 percent of respondents said that they would spend less on network management disciplines and 39 percent actually said that they would spend more on network management disciplines.

Considering the economic woes on everyone’s mind – that’s pretty huge. And it implies that network management is seen as a necessity rather than a luxury. For example, a plurality of 28 percent of survey respondents indicated that the least likely to see an increase in spending in 2009 was change management. This makes sense: No money, means no new projects, which means no change, and no need for change management. Plus, change management has been a heavy investment area over the past few years so more competency has been built in this discipline at the expense of others.

Overall, 34 percent of survey respondents actually plan to increase overall IT spending in 2009, with 54 percent keeping it the same level. Only 12 percent plan to cut IT spending in 2009.

Does this mean that the economy is better than perhaps we had thought? Unlikely. Instead, what I think this means is that either A) IT is seen as such a vital part of the company that companies aren’t likely to cut corners, B) the corners have already been cut so far that there isn’t much left to cut without hitting something vital, or C) IT is finally starting to make the case that spending there can reduce costs elsewhere in the company.

Look at the big trends in IT: Server virtualization, datacenter consolidation, WAN application development, teleconferencing – all of these are designed to reduce cost. To some extent, IT has always been about leveraging technology to do more with less money, but there’s definitely more of a pronounced emphasis on the “less money” part of that equation than the “do more” part.

If you’re interested, we have a press release about the survey on the NetQoS main Web site.