The US credit problem, resulting from banks being unwilling to add more loans to their current debt loads, is "the biggest threat from a buyer's standpoint," said Brian Babineau, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "A lot of IT purchases are financed."

Budget-cutting may drive some companies to engage in more offshore outsourcing. But the presidential election is a potential wild card. Eugene Kublanov, CEO of outsourcing consultancy NeoIT, said the next president could propose tax incentives to encourage job growth in the US -- especially if Democratic candidate Barack Obama is elected.

The IT job market is likely to see an influx of newly available talent, partly because of payroll cutbacks in the financial services industry as newly merged banks consolidate their systems and data centers. And a longer-term outcome of Wall Street's implosion may be increased enrollments in computer science programs at US universities, as IT becomes a more attractive career option for students who might have pursued banking and finance paths before.

One thing that won't change, though, is the advice IT managers are getting on how they can reduce costs by consolidating servers and installing virtualization technology.

Ken Brill, executive director of The Uptime Institute, said that as many as 15 percent of the servers in any data center are "comatose." Eliminating those systems can save lots of money -- as can focusing on energy savings when buying new servers, according to Brill. And the time may be even riper for such steps now. "Maybe in this downturn," he said, "efficiency will become more important."