NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - We've heard so many bleak forecasts from so many tech companies that they're all starting to sound the same -- right down to the last adjective.

Last week, the CEO of Novellus warned investors that the outlook for IT spending was looking "very, very murky." This week, EMC's chief said the spending environment appeared "incredibly murky."

Hey, looks murky to me, too -- extra murky, in fact, and it's tempting to leave it at that.

But, for better or worse, I've been reading through some recent reports from the professional prognosticators at the Gartner Group, Forrester Research, the Aberdeen Group and WR Hambrecht in search of insight as to what may be coming down the pike.

First, the bad news: While IT budgets seem to have stopped shrinking, there doesn't seem much hope for a second-half rebound. In a report titled (with admirable clarity), "Recovery Delayed," the folks at Gartner take a hatchet to earlier, sunnier views, suggesting that a real recovery isn't likely until the second quarter of next year

Still, the folks at Gartner expect the "most likely scenario" is for modest growth in the range of 3 to 4 percent. Gartner's forecast is still a little sunnier than that of rival forecaster Forrester Research, which expects IT spending to grow only a little more than 2 percent this year. WR Hambrecht analyst Johnny Svoren, meanwhile, expects that IT spending will "remain about flat" for the current quarter, with only "modest growth potential by late 2002 or early 2003." Eschewing decimal-point precision, he suggests only that growth in 2003 will hit the "mid-single-digit[s]."

Despite the near-term pessimism, these prognosticators are generally more upbeat for the long term. Gartner expects 7 percent growth in 2003 and 2004, while WR Hambrecht suggests growth could hit 10 percent. Analyst Hugh Bishop of the Aberdeen group is more pessimistic, suggesting that the "halcyon days" are over and that in the future IT spending will likely be "more closely tied to GDP and top-line corporate revenue growth" and may hit only 4 to 6 percent a year.

Gartner's report, while the vaguest of the bunch about tech's future prospects, offers the most detailed analysis of current spending patterns, based on surveys of roughly 1,000 executives and managers at North American companies.

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One reason the "run-and-gun days of high spending" are over, Gartner suggests, is that many more companies (nearly 60 percent) have centralized control over their IT spending -- up from only 17 percent at the start of 2001. Only 12 percent of firms expect to cut budgets further in the second half, while 19 percent expect to actually raise them.

But budget increases won't necessarily raise all boats among tech vendors. In the case of hardware, Gartner found that 87 percent of companies with Dell as their main server provider expect to buy more servers by the end of the year, while only 66 percent of IBM customers expect to. Only 1 percent of Dell customers say they'll consider using another vendor, while 12 percent of IBM customers say they're thinking of switching. Among storage vendors, EMC faces the biggest risk of defectors -- with more than 20 percent of customers saying they may switch to someone else.

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