Hi Shaw- Looks like this is your first post, so welcome to the community! I focus a lot on customer care and contact center, and what I'm seeing is that cost-cutting is still very important with many businesses and organizations, but that it's strongly tempered by a desire to improve their customer care (driven by the imperative to keep their customers in uncertain economic times). Specifically, businesses and organizations are willing to spend on products and solutions that improve customer care in innovative ways that make maximum use of their existing resources-- for example, using presence-enabled subject matter experts outside the contact center to assist with customer calls, or taking their first steps into "customer collaboration" by leveraging modern web social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and various user forums to proactively identify and resolve customer issues.
Something else we've been seeing is that companies--like Cisco--with a strong cash position are investing in transformational technologies such as Collaboration and Video to differentiate themselves from their competitors and prepare for the upturn.
