NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - For workers on the receiving end of a pink slip -- as well as the companies doling out the slips -- it has been a summer of discontent.

A recent study by Challenger Gray & Christmas found that layoffs in the tech sector jumped to 25,392 in June, up from 8,366 in May. What's worse, according to another recent study, only 6,000 jobs were created in June for the entire country.

Real Networks announced a 10 percent cut last week, Sun Microsystems is laying off 1,000 workers, Intel is lopping 4,000 off its headcount, and Hewlett-Packard announced it was speeding up its plans to eliminate 15,000 positions.

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Of course, layoffs are a delicate exercise for businesses. When times are tough -- as they clearly are today -- companies must react and reduce infrastructure costs. But overreacting by eliminating too many positions can have an adverse effect when the economy rebounds: A company can find itself flat-footed, with too few employees to handle resurgent demand.

Both Sun and Intel got hit when they announced their layoff plans; Wall Street thought they were too conservative. A study released by Forrester on Aug. 1 found that companies such as Intel and Sun may benefit as corporate IT spending begins to improve. For others, however, the picture remains grim, with little sign of improvement on the horizon.

According to the Forrester study, overall IT spending will increase 2.3 percent over last year's numbers during the second half of this year, and 82 percent of companies "will at least hang onto" their IT budgets in the second half of 2002.

Nineteen percent of respondents said they were increasing IT spending in the second half, while 12 percent said they were cutting. The majority reported that they were maintaining their budget levels. "We expected the worst, but actually the news was a little more positive," says Tom Pohlmann, a senior analyst at Forrester.

When you break it down by industry sector and IT segment, the future gets a little dicier. Industries reporting the biggest planned increases in technology spending are financial services, insurance, and consumer services. One of the sectors least likely to improve spending? The high-tech industry itself.

In fact, the tech industry was so unlikely to increase its budget, Forrester couldn't even include it on one of its charts: It was, quite literally, off the map. "The high-tech industry is its own worst enemy," says Chris Mines, a group director at Forrester. Mines blames the telecom meltdown for much of the budget decline.

A close look at what companies are planning to buy reveals an important pattern -- and this is where companies like Sun and Intel can take solace. More than half of the survey respondents said they were likely to purchase infrastructure hardware such as servers, networking tools, and storage products -- items that are Intel's and Sun's bread and butter. "If I'm Intel or Sun, I've got to be feeling a little bit better," Mines says. "The strength is on the infrastructure side of things."

The prospects for enterprise software companies such as Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, however, aren't as good, and if the trend continues, workers at these companies could find pink slips in their mailboxes later this year. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and middleware products are among the lowest in spending priority, according to the study, with fewer than 20 percent of respondents planning to purchase additional products or replacements in these areas.

"The buyers of enterprise software applications have indigestion," Mines says. "Many companies have bought these products and are implementing them, but they're not planning on buying more anytime soon."

So, is there a cure for these summertime blues? Depends on whom you ask, and whom you work for.

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