Worldwide IT spending expected to reach $3.6 trillion in 2012: Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is expected to grow by 3 per cent to reach $3.6 trillion in 2012, according to the latest outlook by technology research firm Gartner.

Gartner's 2012 IT spending outlook has been revised up slightly from the 2.5 per cent projection last quarter.

"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 Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. "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."

However, there are some bright spots for IT providers. In contrast to the rather lackluster growth outlook for overall IT spending, Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012.

Gartner projects enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion by 2016.

"Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster," Gordon said.

Gartner forecast global IT services spending to reach $864 billion in 2012, a 2.3 per cent increase from 2011.

Demand for consulting services is expected to remain high due to the complexity of environments for global business and technology leaders. Gartner analysts said consulting itself is becoming increasingly technology-based with the rise of analytics and big data, having deep implications on the future of consulting services.

The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market, said Gartner.

Telecom services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in emerging markets, but also in mature markets from the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets, gaming and other consumer electronics devices.
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