There could be all manner of ramifications if the UK decides to leave the EU in the soon-to-be-held membership referendum, but apparently the impact on the tech industry will be a slight one – at least in the short-term.
This is according to a report from IDC entitled: 'Brexit and its Impact on IT Spending in the UK and Europe: Current Consensus Among IDC's European Analysts'.
Essentially, IDC took a poll across its European researchers to find out what each of them felt a 'Brexit' would mean for tech spending, and the current consensus, broadly speaking, is that it would be "mildly negative for IT spend in the UK".
In the announcement highlighting the report, exact figures or forecasted stats weren't made available. But a British exit from the EU clearly isn't something that bothers the IDC bean counters in terms of the potential hurt that could be visited on the IT industry.
Cloud spending
As The Register reports, the simple truth is that spending on the likes of the cloud, analytics and mobile is on the definite up-and-up, and that won't be deterred to any great degree no matter what political tremors manifest come the June referendum.
And no one will be looking to hastily switch their outsourcing deals and so forth depending on the result – although that could well change in the longer-term.
As for the impact on the EU itself, IDC says that would be "neutral", so again in short: nothing doing.
The debate about whether we should leave the EU or not continues to rage on, with the latest 'bombshell' dropped by the Chancellor being the statement that he believes income tax would have to rise by no less than 8p in the pound to make up for the amount we would lose in tax revenues if we left (mind you, that's looking 15 years into the future).