Gartner has raised its predictions for worldwide IT spending, despite the perilous economic situation affecting many countries.
The research and analysis company predicts IT spending in 2012 will hit $3.6 trillion, a 3% increase on 2011’s figure of $3.5 trillion. This is slightly up on previous estimates of a 2.5% rise in IT spending predicting by Gartner.
The reason behind the increasing forecast is cloud computing. Gartner believes enterprise spending on public cloud services will grow from $91bn in 2011 to $109bn in 2012. By 2016 that figure should hit $207bn, Gartner believes.
Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, said: "Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by organisations, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster."
The telecoms market will also provide a big area of growth and will in fact make up the majority of IT spending. Telecoms equipments spending will rise 10.8% in 2012 and telecoms services will see 1.4% increase in spending this year. Gartner says this is to do with a combination of net connections in emerging markets and the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones, in mature markets.
"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilised," said Gordon. "There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending."
Gartner thinks tech spending will continue to rise into 2013. The company is predicting a 4.4% rise on 2012’s figures to take spending to $3.78 trillion.
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