Gartner is forecasting that worldwide IT spending will reach $3.6 trillion in 2012, a 3 percent increase from 2011 spending of $3.5 trillion — a slightly faster growth pace than the 2.5 percent projection last quarter.
“While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilized,” 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.”
Some bright spots: Enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion. The vast majority of this is for business process as a service (BPaaS), although platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster.
Worldwide IT services spending is forecast to reach $864 billion in 2012, a 2.3 percent increase from 2011.
Global telecom services is the largest IT spending market.
