According to a report recently released by IDC Korea on IT expenditure by Korean companies for 2006, the total IT investments by domestic firms is anticipated to grow by about 5% this year. Also, it is expected that IT investments by small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) will increase by a lesser 4.6%. This report, which is based on an enduser research project dubbed "Vertical Market Intelligence," was conducted on 528 companies out of 9,148 firms whose total sales stood at over 10 billion won. The report contains details of analyses made according to company size and the types of industries concerned on the current status of new technologies and solutions being adopted by the companies surveyed, and their IT expenditures for 2006 as well as future plans. As for the size of a company, the survey, which was conducted during the last two months of 2005, categorizes companies with employees of 1,000 or more as large firms while those with employees of less than 1,000 are referred to as SMEs. According to the report, it was found out that IT spending by SMEs was the highest at 33% in the category of hardware that included PC's and servers, followed by investments on IT services. This can be said to be a special feature of SMEs since IT investments made by the overall industry of the domestic market are found out to be at the highest in the category of IT services. In the hardware category, IT expenditures for PC's were decidedly at their highest at 44%. Small businesses with less than 100 employees, in particular, were shown to have IT expenditures for PC's account for over 55% of their total IT spending, thus revealing a trait that IT spending for PC's, instead of servers and other storage devices, takes up a larger portion of the expenditure as the size of a company gets smaller. In other words, the report revealed that as the size of a company gets smaller more interest has been shown with a larger investment for the office automation at the individual level than the computerization of a company as a whole. In the server category, meanwhile, it was found out that investments made on Unix servers were at their highest in the case of SMEs, too. However, it was shown that the relative weight of investment made on Windows NT stood at over 55% in the case of small companies with less than 100 employees. In sum, the relative weight of the investment on Windows NT showed a trend of gradually increasing as the size of a company grew larger. In the case of the solutions market, the most vigorous investments made by SMEs were investments in the fields of security, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Management Information Systems (MIS), with over 60% of SMEs having already introduced security and ERP/MIS solutions. In the case of the security field, the report cautioned that a special attention is required since over 20% of the SMEs surveyed still remained in security blind spots despite the fact that security solutions were at the highest demand in the solutions market. The report also said that the ratio of SMEs that have introduced ERP/MIS stood relatively high helped by the government's information-driven policy. In the meantime, the report forecast that solutions-related investments by SMEs in 2006 will be vigorously made for adopting a variety of groupware products and storages. Lee Kyung-hee, research manager at IDC Korea, said, "Although SMEs account for less than 1/3 of the total IT market, I anticipate that SMEs, as opposed to conglomerates, will provide more opportunities to IT firms." Under such circumstances, the researcher emphasized that IT firms must develop and supply specialized products to meet the needs of SMEs and exert efforts to enhance management and secure marketing channels for expanding the market base and providing quality services.