Worldwide IT spending is set to reach US$3.6trn in 2012, up 3pc from last year. This has been revised upwards from the 2.5pc projected in the last quarter, according to Gartner.
Gartner arrived at this forecast after analysing the technology decisions of 75pc of Global 500 companies.
“While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilised,” 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.”
Spending on public cloud to grow in 2012
However, there are some bright spots for IT providers. In contrast to the rather lacklustre growth outlook for overall IT spending, Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91bn worldwide in 2011 to $109bn in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207bn.
“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 $864bn in 2012, a 2.3pc 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.
