Thursday, July 7, 2011

Gartner Updates Annual IT Spending Forecasts

The world's leading information technology research and advisory company Gartner has recently issued updated forecasts for the global IT spending. According to the new estimates, the worldwide IT spending will grow 7.1 percent this year to US$3.7 trillion, which is 1.5% higher than previously anticipated (Gartner’s previous forecast was of 5.6 percent). The growth is largely attributed to cloud migration and increased spending on software and IT services.

Below we also summarize the spending forecasts as to the IT segments:

• Hardware spending is expected to grow at a rate of 11.7 percent to $419 billion (this is slower than last year's growth rate of 12.1 percent).

• Spending in the software and IT services segments is largely driven by the growing adoption of public cloud services and software-as-a-service. On a percentage basis, spending on IT services will more than double, growing by 6.6 percent to reach $846 billion. Last year, spending on IT services totaled $793 billion, growing only by 3.1 percent. Software spending is expected to grow by 9.5 percent year-over-year to $268 billion, Gartner said.

• Spending on telecommunications will increase to $2.1 trillion, growing year-over-year by 6.9 percent.

Source: Computerworld