Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Public Cloud and Telecom to Lead $3.6 Trillion in IT Spending This Year, Gartner Says

The market research firm Gartner is out today with its latest look on global trends for enterprise information technology this year, and despite what you might expect, given the state of the world’s major economies, it’s not being revised downward. In fact, it’s going up slightly.

Gartner’s last forecast for the year called for global spending on IT to hit $3.5 trillion. Today it has added an extra $100 billion to that estimate, and nudged its official estimate for the year upward to $3.6 trillion.

Leading the pack of the the market segments that are expected to grow is investment in public cloud services, expected to grow by about $109 billion, which is a lot faster than the $91 billion previously thought. By 2016, Gartner reckons, spending on public cloud services will more or less double again, to north of $200 billion.

Most IT spending will be on moving various business processes to vendors, some of them cloud software players, into the cloud, where they can be sold on a subscription basis, or “as-a-service.” It’s followed closely by “infrastructure-as-a-service,” which is growing almost as fast.

Services generally will amount to a $864 billion worth of spending this year, amounting to a 2.3 percent increase over last year. Ever-more-complex environments that combine stuff that runs in the cloud and on-premise are boosting demand for IT consulting services.

That the marketplace is still growing — and not shrinking — is in line with results from prior surveys by other companies, but it’s also welcome news, given the slow pace of growth in the U.S., the weakness of the Euro Zone as that region’s countries struggle with their ongoing sovereign debt crisis, and the slower rate of growth in China. Though it’s important to remember that the last time Gartner released this figure, in January, it was when it revised it downward from $3.8 trillion. If that’s what a step in the right direction looks like, then I guess I’ll take it.

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