Aite Group put out a new, optimistic IT spending report for the capital markets yesterday that, like the Wall Street & Technology IT spending survey that we released in November, predicts an increase in IT spending of just under 10% for 2008, as well as for the ensuing years through 2011. (By contrast, a more conservative Celent report anticipated only a 4% rise in spending this year, to $36.2 billion.)

According to Aite estimates, capital markets firms spent $38.1 billion on IT in 2007 and they'll spend $41.8 billion this year, $45.1 billion in 2009, $50.4 billion in 2010 and $54.9 billion in 2011.

The 13 CIOs Aite surveyed said their top business objective for 2008 IT spending is operational efficiency, followed closely by reducing costs and then compliance. Their top five IT priorities are global trading and settlement (cited by 61%), systems integration (47%), broker workstations (47%), business intelligence solutions (46%) and risk management systems (39%).

Asked about specific applications they plan to invest in, a large majority -- 69% -- said they plan to implement an enterprise data management solution this year. Along similar lines, 62% of respondents said they plan to implement an enterprise reporting solution in 2008. A little more than half (54%) plan to deploy a business intelligence solution. Just under half (46%) say they plan to implement process automation tools. Services-oriented architectures are developing deeper roots -- 46% of respondents plan to implement a SOA this year. But in spite of CEP vendor hype, only 23% anticipate adopting a complex event processing solution this year.

Interestingly, the CIOs Aite surveyed plan to hire business analysts (54% said they would increase staff in this area), project and program managers (46%), developers (46%) and systems administrators (31%) in 2008 -- good news for IT job-seekers.