The wide-ranging conglomerate said it is seeing broad improvement in its business lines and raised its outlook for the full year. The outlook reflects some optimism about the business environment and the company’s long-running shift into higher-margin activities and faster-growing areas of the globe.

“We are in more of a growth mode,” IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge said on a conference call. “I feel like we have a good hand going into the second quarter.”

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This, according to research firm Forrester, which claims technology spending will roar back to life in 2010, ending the econalypse once and for all.

“While the Q3 2009 data for the U.S. and the global market showed continued declines in tech purchases (as we expected),” the company said in its report, U.S. and Global IT Market Outlook: Q4 2009, “we predict that the Q4 2009 data will show a small increase in buying activity, or at worst, just a small decline.”

Forrester (FORR) expects U.S. IT spending to grow by 6.6 percent in 2010 after falling 8.2 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, global IT spending, which plummeted 8.9 percent last year, will rise 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion.

Driving the recovery: Software, hardware and communications equipment. According to Forrester, worldwide spending on software is set to grow by 9.7 percent in the months ahead, spending on hardware and other computer equipment by 8.2 percent and spending on comm gear by 7.6 percent.

Said Forrester principal analyst Andrew Bartels: “All the pieces are in place for a 2010 tech spending rebound. In the U.S., the tech recovery will be much stronger than the overall economic recovery, with technology spending growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product this year.”

But this assumes there will be no further financial disaster in 2010. If this is not the case, then we have something else to look forward to.

“The most likely alternative to our forecast that the U.S. and global IT markets will recover in 2010 is a faltering tech market due to a double-dip recession that returns in 2010 after a brief two- to three-quarter economic recovery,” Forrester explains. “Should this happen, U.S. tech purchases would decline by 3% to 4% in 2010, with a second-half decline offsetting a first-half tech revival.”

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• Econalypto: A Rightsizing Roundup
• Google: Whoops! Econalypse
• Econalypse Now
• Analyst: The Great Dark Times Cometh!
• Wall Street: Give Me Something to Stop the Bleeding
• GOOG at $398? Clearly, You’re Dyslexic.
• WaMu: Epic Bail
• Ballmer: Better Safe Than Lehman Bros.
• Lehman Brothers: $2.5 Billion for a Bankruptcy Well Done
• Here’s $39 Billion in Recognition for Your Hard Work on the Forthcoming Financial Crisis
• Weekend at Bernanke’s II
• Weekend at Bernankes

India’s second-largest software exporter by revenue after Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. is planning to hire 1,000 employees in the U.S., Chief Executive S. Gopalakrishnan said in an interview.

The company, which had 1,200 U.S. employees as of March 31, had said in April it would hire more staff there. As of Sept. 30, it had a total of 105,453 employees.

Infosys gets about 66 percent of its revenue from the U.S. market. The company joins other Indian software exporters in gradually stepping up hiring to prepare for an expected increase in outsourcing deals as technology spending makes a modest comeback in developed nations.

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“Our sales guys are picking up more interest at corporations,” Mr. Smith said in an interview Thursday. Conversations with customers, he said, are often focusing on the value proposition inherent in upgrading to new computers and servers.

“In general, what we see is that things are improving,” Mr. Smith said. The stimulus package in China has provided a direct boost to the PC market because of the government’s efforts to close the digital divide among its population. And while the European market isn’t yet showing strength, the U.S. market appears to be improving.

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For its fiscal second quarter ended February 28, FSI posted revenue of $8.6 million, which is down 60 percent–60 percent!–from the $21.4 million reported in the year-earlier quarter. That brings total first-half revenues to $20.9 million, down 52 percent from $43.9 million a year ago. For the quarter, the company lost $9.4 million, or 30 cents a share, including $2.8 million in severance costs and a $500,000 increase in its reserve for inventory obsolescence.

In a statement, CEO Don Mitchell gives the explanation you’d expect: “The global economic downturn is continuing to adversely impact credit availability, consumer confidence and technology spending,” which in turn has caused “low factory utilization levels” at most semiconductor manufacturing companies, resulting in reduced or delayed capital spending.

And despite some optimism on the Street, Mitchell does not see any early recovery. “Even though it is reported that several device producers have recently started to experience improved utilization levels, we anticipate that this situation will persist until at least early calendar 2010,” he says.

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Wu contends that there is still room for significant growth in both the Mac and iPhone businesses, where its market share is relatively small given the size of the PC and cellphone markets. “While continued difficult global macroeconomic headwinds and their impact on technology and consumer spending concern us, we believe the Apple adoption story is still intact and believe the company is positioned to weather the storm better than most,” he writes.

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