Regardless of whether or not health care reform comes to pass in the U.S., or the form it takes should it pass, adoption of electronic health records will accelerate along with increased product demand for health care IT vendors.

“There is a little bit of perception out there that no health care reform is bad for hospitals and it’s bad for the health care IT vendors,” said Steve Halper, associate head of U.S. research at Thomas Weisel Partners. “This is an incorrect view, in our opinion. The reason why it’s not going to happen is because the ARRA incentives are in place, and they are independent of health care reform.”

While Halper predicts a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats scenario for the health care IT space, he believes those companies with the best product suites will benefit the most.

“We think that Cerner (CERN) and Epic are the top two companies in the space,” Halper said. “After that it would be Eclipsys (ECLP) and McKesson (MCK). And I think their product suites are competitive, but Cerner and Epic are probably growing faster.”

The analyst also emphasizes that much in the same way not all health care IT vendors are created equal, not all physicians are on the same path of EHR adoption.

“We are a little more cautious towards physician office software vendors,” Halper said. “The large groups will make these investments, but the smaller physician groups will probably drag their feet a little bit more and we might not see the acceleration in demand from that segment right away.”

Senior Analyst Tom Mitchell of Miller Tabak suggests a bleak forecast for Western bank investing, at least for the near future. Real estate problems cause the analyst particular concern, as an uncertain amount of expected loan risk may heavily influence this environment.

“I think that the key is that balance sheets, where commercial real estate represents 100% or 200% of shareholders’ capital, are going to be subject to inherent volatility in the next six to 12 months,” said Mitchell, cautioning investors who will buy regardless of trends. “So we think that investors who think they want to own banks should be prepared for that volatility and plan to hold the banks through it if they’re going to own them in the first place.”

Mitchell closely watches real estate value trends and the affects on such companies as Zions (ZION), City National (CYN) and Wells Fargo (WFC).

“We like to see high-loss reserves relative to non-performing assets and troubled debt restructurings; we like to see high levels of capital and some indication that increases in non-performing assets have leveled off, even though the non-performing assets are continuing to grow,” said Mitchell, who expects economic fits and starts, concentrating on areas that had the most overbought real estate conditions but are now recovering.

“So that doesn’t leave us with a whole lot of candidates out there,” he said. “That’s sort of where we tend to suggest people focus at the moment because we don’t think it’s clear sailing ahead.”

However bumpy the road may get, Mitchell predicts investors in Western banks may find themselves a leg up on their geographic counterparts, potentially achieving better growth than the rest of the U.S. over the next 20 years.

Kevin Kelly, the CEO of executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles, and Gary Hayes, a partner in Hayes Brunswick & Partners, have written a propitious book, Leading in Turbulent Times published by Pearson.  The authors interviewed many top leaders who have managed to survive and often thrive during these difficult times.  According to a piece by Alicia Whitaker in the Huffington Post,

Kelly and Hayes found patterns among those who were being successful, across industries and geographies, with implications for anyone working to turn things around in this recession. Three things stood out for them: passion rules and carries the day, hard times call for a mastery of soft skills, especially communication, to motivate and engage people and keeping a long term vision in place and well communicated is the best way to keep focused and positive in spite of necessary firefighting.

The authors have presented highly organized perspective on the skills and techniques top executive need to survive today.

2010 should see a return to normalcy in corporate IT spending, with virtualization and security at the top of many CTOs’ wish lists this year.

“We think it’s important to keep in mind that normal IT spending growth is kind of low to mid-single digit. There will certainly be areas where there’s faster growth than that,” said Todd Weller, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. “The other thing that I think you’ll see happen in 2010 is certainly there will be desktop, server and networking equipment refreshes as well to consider. We think in 2010, you get to a better outlook and visibility is better as well.”

Weller bases his forecast on the solid 4Q and December-quarter results released by a number of software companies, demonstrating a trend toward improved IT spending since year end. The analyst predicts the majority of 2010 IT investments will fall in the realm of cost-effective upgrades and new technology that should lead to high ROI.

“For example, from a recent InformationWeek survey, with respect to 2010 new technology investments, there was a new customer facing projects like Web portals, sales and self-service systems, new applications to support sales, new applications to cut operating costs,” said Weller, also highlighting Windows 7 as a meaningful catalyst for software updates. “Server virtualization was up there, telepresence, video conferencing, software as a service, desktop virtualization. That gives you a sense of some of the focus points.”

Of the information security companies, Weller believes ArcSight (ARST) is the most poised for growth, with 30%-plus growth rates already. Under the infrastructure umbrella, the analyst cites VMware (VMW), Citrix Systems (CTXS) and Red Hat (RHT) as important plays on virtualization.