IT spending to keep falling, says Gartner

Global spending on IT is likely to fall by a further six per cent this year according to analyst firm Gartner.

Today the firm said that it was expecting to see IT spend total $3.2 trillion in 2009, a six per cent fall against the $3.4 trillion it saw in 2008.

Previously, Gartner had been expecting a drop of just under four per cent, but now it explained that market factors and exchange rate movements had lead to it lowering its forecasts. Worse than this, Gartner said that unlike in the previous economic slowdown of 2001, all areas of spending were falling.

Gartner splits the IT market into four parts: hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications. It warned that none would be immune from the slowdown.

Hardware is set to fare the worst with spending expected to fall by 16.3 per cent while software will perform the 'best', dropping just 1.6 per cent.

"While the global economic downturn shows signs of easing, this year IT budgets are still being cut and consumers will need a lot more persuading before they can feel confident enough to loosen their purse strings," said Richard Gordon, research vice president and head of global forecasting at Gartner.

Gordon added that there may be worse news to come as "the full impact of the global recession" starts to take its toll.

"The forecast decline in spending growth for the hardware and software segments in 2009 has almost stabilised, and only minor downward revisions have been made to these forecasts this quarter," he continued.

"However, the full impact of the global recession on the IT services and telecommunications sectors is still emerging, and forecast growth in these areas has been further reduced significantly. Moreover, the rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies in recent months will have a material downward impact on 2009 IT spending growth, which by convention we report based on US dollars."