Total IT spending around the world will hit $3.8 trillion in 2015, representing a 2.4% growth rate from last year, according to the latest research from Gartner.
The Gartner study detailed how the growth rate is down from earlier predictions of 3.9%, driven by a strengthening US dollar and a reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services.
Richard Gordon, a research VP at Gartner, told CBR: "We were interested to see if there was going to be any impact as a result of the volatility in the global economy, due to oil prices and political instability, and so far there hasn’t been."
John-David Lovelock, research VP at Gartner, added: "The change in forecast is less dramatic than it might at first seem. The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change — in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 per cent."
The report also found that the smartphone market is becoming polarised between the high- and low-end market price points, as the market becomes increasingly limited for midrange smartphones.
Gartner’s Richard Gordon added: "The tablet market is slowing down. We’ve got larger screen smartphones, or phablet like devices, on the one hand, and thinner, lighter more portable laptops on the other end. So within the devices space overall, we’re seeing this high-end low-end split in terms of form factor.
Meanwhile, spending on data centre systems is set to reach $143bn in 2015, a 1.8% increase from 2014, driven by an increased demand for cloud-based services.
"We’re not seeing any great shifts in the data centre space in terms of overall spending. But we are seeing a shift to hyperscale data centres, therefore, a shift in spending away from the enterprise towards the large service providers who build very large hyperscale data centres," Gordon added.
"It all boils down to cost at the end of the day. It costs a lot of money for companies to build and maintain their own data centre, so if they can shift that spend away from capital spending towards an operational spending model, it works from a financial model perspective and can also help to reduce costs as well."
In the telecom services market, spending is predicted to grow 0.7% in 2015 to $1.638 trillion, with spending in the enterprise software market forecast to grow 5.5% to $335bn.
