Gartner revises up its IT spending forecast

Global IT spending is on course to increase three per cent from $3.5 trillion in 2011 to $3.6 trillion this year, despite continued global economic uncertainty.

This is the view put forward by market watcher Gartner in its 2012 global IT spending forecast.

The three per cent rise is slightly higher (0.5 per cent) than previously forecasted by the firm.

"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist the Eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, and a slowdown in China the outlook has at least stabilised, " said Richard Gordon, research vice president of Gartner.

Despite this, he said the short-term outlook was for continued caution in IT spending because of dampened consumer demand and business confidence.

Cloud computing was one area tipped for strong growth by Gartner, with the firm betting that enterprise investments in public cloud services will increase from $91 billion in 2011 to $109 billion this year.

The firm also predicts that enterprise public cloud services spending will top $207 billion by 2016.

Gordon said Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) were fast growing areas, but Business-as-a-Service platform (BPaaS) still accounts for the majority of IT spending.

Meanwhile, the global telecom services market is still the sector that receives the most amount of investment, said Gartner.

"Telecom services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in the emerging markets, but also in mature [ones because of the] uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets and gaming," added the company in a statement.