Worldwide IT spending to surpass US$3.6 trillion: Gartner

• Public cloud services to grow from US$109bil in 2012 to more than US$200bil by 2016
• Business process as a service accounts for vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises

WORLDWIDE IT spending is on pace to reach US$3.6 trillion in 2012, a 3% increase from 2011 spending of US$3.5 trillion, according to the latest outlook by Gartner Inc, whose IT spending outlook has been revised up slightly from the 2.5% projection last quarter.
 
"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker US 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."
 
However, there are some bright spots for IT providers. In contrast to the rather lackluster growth outlook for overall IT spending, Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from US$91 billion worldwide in 2011 to US$109 billion in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach US$207 billion.
 
"Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster," Gordon said.
 
Worldwide IT services spending is forecast to reach US$864 billion in 2012, a 2.3% increase from 2011. Demand for consulting services is expected to remain high due to the complexity of environments for global business and technology leaders.
 
Gartner analysts said consulting itself is becoming increasingly technology-based with the rise of analytics and big data, having deep implications on the future of consulting services.
 
The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market. Telecom services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in emerging markets, but also in mature markets from the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets, gaming and other consumer electronics devices.
 
Gartner's IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of the sales by thousands of vendors across the entire range of IT product and services. Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data upon which to base its forecast.
 
The most recent IT spending forecast research is available at www.gartner.com/quarterly-it-forecast. This Quarterly IT Spending Forecast section includes links to the latest IT spending reports, webinars, blog posts and press releases.