Cisco CEO John Chambers recently announced that the slowdown in corporate IT spending will continue until 2009.

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Cisco chief John Chambers has some bad news for the technology sector: He no longer expects the recent slowdown in tech spending to pick up until next year at the earliest.

IT is still spending dollars, but not as freely as in past years. In a constrained budgetary environment, IT now has to ask the question, "What's going to give me the best bang for my buck?"

What makes this question even more difficult to answer is that IT still has to address all the same concerns it always has: how to increase capacity, improve application performance, and maintain security. It's just that now it has a more limited budget within which it must work.

Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, has an answer to that question. You may recall that Mr. Metzler is a proponent of knocking down the silos that exist within IT in order to successfully deliver applications in a secure, fast, and available manner.

He recently completed another brief, this time focusing on the best way to maximize IT investments in a constrained economy.

Assuming Mr. Chambers is correct, and organizations will continue to be financially constrained throughout 2008 and into 2009, Mr. Metzler's brief on Maximizing IT Investments is an excellent read with solid advice on how best to spend what few dollars you may have in order to see the greatest "bang for your buck" while meeting the priorities of the organization.

Get the brief here: Maximizing IT Investments: Recession Proofing your Network