Most of India's educational institutions are set to enjoy "moderate to high IT spending" over the next few years, said Springboard Research.
According to the latest Springboard report, the country's education sector is expected to double its IT spending from US$356 million in 2008 to US$704 million in 2012.
Nilotpal Chakravarti, senior research analyst, vertical markets at Springboard Research, said upgrading networking and basic IT infrastructure and implementing IT security ranked highest on the agenda of most of the 250 IT decision makers surveyed.
"Educational institutions in India are presently focused on the deployment of IT systems that will enable them to improve the educational process for their students, and to stay ahead of the competition," he said.
Wireless LAN, storage area network (SAN) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) were the three most popular technologies adopted so far.
Springboard said the majority of institutions also reported they intended to spend up to half of total IT spend on software, with spending on IT services remaining a lower proportion. Almost half of respondents spent 25 percent of their budgets on services.
On the priority given to software spend, Chakravarti said: "License and subscription fee renewals take up a large piece of spending, while network infrastructure upgrades will enable students and teachers to have more access to quality curriculum-based digital content such as digital learning objects."
Springboard noted that a handful of IT vendors dominated the market. The majority of respondents named Microsoft as the "leader" in software. IBM, NIIT and Oracle were also named by respondents. IBM was singled out as the hardware leader, with over a third of respondents naming it as their "preferred vendor", and HP was ranked the top PC vendor.
Networking companies D-Link and Cisco were also singled out in their category by survey respondents.
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