It turns out worldwide spending on IT by companies is proving surprisingly resilient given the circumstances, according to a new forecast by the market research firm Gartner. The firm expects overall tech spending to grow by 7.1 percent this year, representing an upward revision from a previous forecast of 5.6 percent.

In dollar terms that works out to a total forecast of $3.6 trillion. Of that, Gartner expects $419 billion to be spent on computing hardware, $268 billion on enterprise software, $846 billion on IT services, and $2.1 trillion on telecommunications. (It’s fun to type the word “trillion” and not be referring to federal spending.)

“It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a result of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, but despite widespread concerns about disruptions to the supply of critical components in the initial aftermath of the natural disaster, there has not been a dramatic impact on overall IT spending,” Gartner’s vice president for research Richard Gordon said in a statement.

Spending on cloud services is a big factor in the forecast. Gartner says cloud-related spending is growing four times faster than IT spending, and will reach $89 billion this year. However, it’s informative to note that despite that intense growth, cloud spending amounts to less than three percent of the overall IT spend.

Even so, cloud category punches above its weight in importance. Gartner says that software-as-service applications — Salesforce.com is a classic example — account for about $10 billion, or about 10 percent of spending on enterprise software. More from Gartner here.

I am considering buying an iPad, but am wondering if I should wait for the second edition which is rumored to be coming soon. What do you advise?

A:

I regard the current, original iPad as an excellent product, and can’t say you’d go wrong with it. But while Apple is famously secretive, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a new model announced in the next few months that will have added or improved features. There’s wide speculation, for instance, it will gain a camera or two. The company has a long history of improving its products, and, in the case of the iPad, must keep making it better to deal with a host of coming tablet rivals. So, if you can wait a few months, I’d do so.

Q:

I see that many of the newer wireless routers with attractive features do not support printer sharing. Does that mean you cannot connect a printer via Ethernet cable to the router and be able to access that printer through the wireless network? Why do so many of the newer routers not support printer sharing?

A:

In the context you seem to be using it, the term “printer sharing” referred to plugging in an otherwise non-networkable printer via USB to a router, which would then make the printer usable over the network. I presume that this feature has declined in popularity as more home printers now have wired or wireless networking built in, and the latest Windows and Mac operating systems make it much easier to share even a printer without its own network features through the computer’s connection to the network. If the printer has wired networking built in, you should be able to plug it into one of the Ethernet jacks on most wireless routers and make it usable on your wireless network.

Q:

I have an almost two-year-old MacBook Pro. The hard drive is nearly full, and I wondered if you knew of any tricks to free up some space. I’m particularly interested in cost-effective fixes.

A:

One useful free utility for freeing up space on a Mac is called Monolingual, and is available at http://bit.ly/dqTCSC. This little utility allows you to remove all the obscure files on a Mac that allow the computer to operate in languages you can’t read or don’t use. For instance, if you only speak and read English, you can erase the files that enable the computer to run in, say, Albanian and Portuguese. Its maker says this can free up hundreds of megabytes of space. I have tried it and it works. Of course, whether you have a Windows PC or a Mac, you can free up space in many other ways, such as by deleting files and programs you don’t use, archiving or deleting old email, and removing temporary browser files.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Tucker is a 13-year veteran of Sun Microsystems whose last job was as Sun’s CTO of cloud computing. He was also VP of the AppExchange at Salesforce.com. He’s also known for “Lew’s Law,” which he describes as more of an informal observation about how far the cost of computing can realistically fall.

I caught up with him last week in New York City to talk about what Cisco, long the powerhouse of networking, plans to do in the cloud.

NewEnterprise: First off, what is Lew’s Law?

Lew Tucker: It’s just an observation, not a real law, that the price of computing will never be free, because it requires energy to compute. Computing is really about changing the state of physical bits, and that requires energy. It’s great that we’re driving the costs down. Moore’s Law is hammering the costs. But there is a lower limit. Right now the dominant cost is around managing software, operations and everything else. So we can take a lot of those costs out through automation.

NewEnterprise: When I think of Cisco I think of industrial-strength routers and switches. How do you get from there to cloud computing?

LT: Eight months ago I thought the same thing. I was with Sun for many years and then left to go to Salesforce.com to do software as a service. I became very enamored of the Salesforce model. I came back to Sun to build the Sun Cloud, which was to be a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services. I was an Amazon user myself and I loved how you could so easily spin up as many servers as you wanted without having to buy them, configure them and so on. Building a cloud is another thing entirely. When Cisco called me, I said to them, “You’re about routers and switches and I’m all about complex distributed computing systems.” And Cisco said they were really about networking and making distributed systems. I started digging into it and realized there was a really unique position at Cisco if you think of cloud computing as a fully automated system with different elements. Some of those are networking elements, and some of those are integrated boxes with computing and storage and networking all in one. Some are networking services.

NewEnterprise: When you think about how cloud computing works, you really can’t do anything without fast connections between one system or another, which is something that Cisco knows very well.

LT: The network has always been a shared piece of infrastructure. There are a lot of different applications running on different servers that are trying to reach either each other or their endpoints. So there’s an awful lot that’s going into the network to make that happen in a fair and efficient way.

NewEnterprise: So what hardware is Cisco building here?

LT: We build pre-integrated compute, storage and networking that we’re calling our Unified Computing Systems. You can buy a rack of these systems, and they’re driven by a set of APIs [application programming interfaces]. We’re not alone in that. Hewlett-Packard does something similar. Then the customers add in their own preferred storage environment, like EMC or NetApp, or they can build their own.

NewEnterprise: What kind of use cases are you seeing in companies? What are your customers asking for right now?

LT: Right now what they are asking about is collaboration services, the integration of video and voice and calendaring and messaging. We’ve seen consumer services like Facebook change what people expect at the office. We have a collaboration product called Quad that looks just like Facebook. WebEx is a Cisco service. We’re working on offering that as both a hosted form and one that runs inside the customer’s own environment.

NewEnterprise: So there are a lot of cloud providers out there already–Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which has its Azure platform. They’ve already deployed their services and have relationships with vendors. How do you see the market shaping up, and what is Cisco’s place in it?

LT: I think there’s going to be two or three large cloud providers, but then there will be many smaller ones who specialize in delivering specialized services. Take health care. In that industry, groups of companies are going to get together and offer a HIPAA-compliant cloud. You’ll also see something similar happen around financial services. Those are two industries that have very specific needs. The cloud will be dominated by a few large providers for sure, but there will also be many specialty cloud providers.

NewEnterprise: You’ve been on the job about six months. What have you learned so far?

LT: I’ve learned that there’s an amazing amount of technology within Cisco. It has the largest concentration of network engineers in the world. Part of my job is to go and align our products and roadmaps with this future world that we’re moving into and to uncover a lot of the new approaches to how we solve different networking problems. I’m an engineer, and I like nothing better than being in a room with a bunch of other engineers with a whiteboard as they all battle it out. I’ve also learned that building cloud infrastructure is a lot harder than everyone thought.

The technology giant has seemed more interested in software and services lately, but still manufactures servers and the microprocessor chips that power many of them. That strategy requires billions of dollars to operate semiconductor factories and develop chip production processes. IBM helps defray those costs by operating a foundry service that makes chips for other companies.

IBM this week is announcing the latest production recipe it will offer foundry customers, promising big benefits for companies designing chips for devices such as routers and switches used in high-speed communication networks. The new offering comes with blocks of pre-designed circuitry-–including microprocessor technology from ARM Holdings, the favorite in cellphones–so that customers can mix and match features to handle particular communications or computing chores.

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It’s far too early to know who will prevail in the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois. Motorola’s complaint alleges that Huawei engaged in an elaborate scheme over a number of years to steal Motorola’s latest technology. Huawei said Thursday it will vigorously defend itself against the allegations, which it said are “utterly without merit.”

The spat has drawn attention to Huawei’s past confrontation with allegations of intellectual property violations, most notably Cisco Systems Inc.’s (CSCO) assertions in 2003 that Huawei stole its router code. Cisco dropped that suit after Huawei agreed to remove its router products from the market and change them, but the incident was deeply embarrassing for the Chinese company.

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“It’s still too early to say what will happen as a result of this investigation,” the CNIL said. “However, we can already state that…Google did indeed record e-mail access passwords [and] extracts of the content of e-mail messages.”

Now, recording passwords and extracting them are two entirely different matters, and there’s no evidence of the latter. That said, this is still an unfortunate revelation for Google (GOOG), which has sought to downplay the implications of the breach by portraying it as a mistake and the data collected as inconsequential. Indeed, last month CEO Eric Schmidt excused the company for its misstep, saying, “There was no harm, no foul.”

No harm, perhaps, but there was certainly a foul–particularly since it now appears the data collected may have been protected by privacy laws.

Ironically, such data collection is a non-issue for all who actually heed the universal advice to secure their Wi-Fi networks–advice that comes in the documentation of every router and advice that Google itself gives the customers of Google WiFi. The FAQ for the service states: “In order to make our service easily accessible to a large number of WiFi-enabled devices, Google WiFi is an open-access wireless network, and our signal is not encrypted. However, users can achieve a secure connection by using GoogleWiFiSecure if their device supports WPA, WPA2 or 802.1x protocols (most laptops do)….As with any wireless network, users should take certain precautions to secure their online experience from security violations by third parties or unintentional security breaches.”

Plainly, Google feels its transgression falls into the latter category–not illegal, but an unintentional intrusion. As Google’s director of public policy, Pablo Chavez, wrote in a recent letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “As an initial matter, collection of network information broadcast by WiFi routers (such as SSID and MAC address) is used to improve location-based services and is a lawful, established business practice….We believe it does not violate U.S. law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (i.e., not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user’s device). We emphasize that being lawful and being the right thing to do are two different things, and that collecting payload data was a mistake for which we are profoundly sorry.”

Cisco still makes most of its money from sales of networking gear, such as routers and switches. But in the last several years, Cisco has expanded into new areas, some as far flung as consumer video cameras and big-screen TV systems for sports stadiums. The Journal wrote about the new businesses and the management structure necessary to manage them last week.

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Political junkies may have heard the term “smart grid,” which is one of the areas that the Obama administration has targeted with its stimulus package. The government is committing billions to facilitate building a next-generation electrical grid that’s more energy efficient.

Cisco looks at all this talk about green and sees, well, green. In order to improve their networks, utilities will need to buy routers and switches and other gear that Cisco just happens to sell. Cisco introduced energy-management software in January, and it will no doubt come out with other products that it will package together for utility companies.

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Long a partner to the big server makers, the networking equipment giant today became a competitor, announcing an aggressive push into the server market. No longer content to peddle switches and routers alone, Cisco (CSCO) is now selling what it calls a unified computing system–a full-blown data center solution that encompasses everything from servers and storage to connectivity and virtualization services. The move is a brazen challenge to IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ) and other vendor partners with whom Cisco had once cooperated. “We’re going to compete with HP,” Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t want to sugarcoat that. There is bound to be change in the landscape of who you compete with and who you partner with.”

Of course, but “change” is rather a tame word for a potentially market-disrupting expansion of Cisco’s business. This is a power grab, plain and simple. A game-changer. Cisco is offering an integrated approach to what’s long been a multivendor arrangement. Whereas before, CIOs would purchase servers from one company, virtualization software from another and networking from yet another, the networking giant is proposing they now purchase them together from a single vendor: Cisco. And that puts it on a collision course with IBM and HP.

“H-P, IBM and Cisco are the new four horsemen of IT infrastructure and they are all fighting to increase their share of the enterprise IT wallet,” Forrester Research analyst James Staten told Marketwatch. “They have all benefited from growth of the market and by taking share from weaker players, but are now needing to go after each other’s strongholds to keep growing. They are definitely leveraging technology evolutions that drive unification, so customers win through this competition, but it’s going to be a bloody fight.”

Cisco is a company that tends to be associated with enterprise networking; at its heart it remains a manufacturer of big honking routers. But over the last few years, the company has made a concerted effort to get into the consumer business, largely through its acquisitions of Linksys, which makes home networking gear, and Scientific Atlanta, manufacturer of cable set-top boxes.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, Cisco made a set of announcements that extend its consumer ambitions considerably.

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“Although JNPR is not immune to macroeconomic weakness, our channel checks suggest solid demand for service provider IP routers,” he writes. He thinks Juniper can hit at least the low end of its 2008 revenue guidance.

Despite the upgrade, he trimmed estimates, and now sees 2008 EPS at $1.03, down from $1.04; for 2009 he goes to $1.16, from $1.38. He now forecasts sales growth of 11 percent this year and 14 percent next year, down from 15 and 17 percent. “Global telco capex and IT spending are at risk in 2009,” he writes.

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