Research firm Gartner has upped its outlook for worldwide IT spending in 2011 to 7.1 per cent from its earlier projection of 5.6 per cent.
Garnter has predicted global IT services to reach $846 billion in 2011, a 6.6 per cent increase from 2010. It says the computing and hardware segment will see the maximum growth with spending forecast to grow 11.7 per cent in 2011.
“It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a results 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,” said Mr Richard Gordon, Research Vice-President at Gartner.
“For 2011 as a whole, we expect Japan IT spending to be down in local currency, but we expect a positive growth trend to emerge in the second half of the year and continue into 2012,” he said.
Gartner says that the spending on public cloud services was only about two per cent of global IT spending in 2010. By 2015, the level of spending on public cloud services will be less than 5 per cent of the total spent on IT overall, it said.
“Nevertheless, the emergence and adoption of cloud is an important trend, and in some markets, it's already a significant factor,” Mr Gordon said. “For example, at about $10 billion, software-as-a-service (SaaS) already accounts for 10 per cent of enterprise applications software spending, and by 2015 this share is expected to increase to close to 15 per cent and to exceed $20 billion in annual spending,” he added.