Global IT spending is projected to total $3.8 trillion in 2014, a 3.1% increase from 2013 spending of $3.7 trillion.
This is according to the latest forecast by market analyst firm Gartner, which notes that in 2013, the market experienced flat growth, growing 0.4% year-over-year.
The firm says spending on devices - including PCs, ultra-mobiles, mobile phones and tablets - contracted 1.2% in 2013, but will grow 4.3% in 2014. Gartner analysts believe convergence of the PC, ultra-mobiles, including tablets, and mobile phone segments, as well as erosion of margins, will take place as differentiation will soon be based primarily on price instead of devices' orientation to specific tasks.
According to Gartner, enterprise software spending growth continues to be the strongest throughout the forecast period. The 2014 annual growth rate is expected to grow 6.8%, it predicts, pointing out that customer relationship management and supply chain management (SCM) experienced a period of strong growth.
"Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts. Investment will also be aligned to B2B analytics, particularly in the SCM space, where annual spending is expected to grow 10.6% in 2014," says Richard Gordon, managing VP at Gartner.
"The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post-sales processes."
Last quarter, Gartner's forecast for 2014 IT spending growth in US dollars was 3.6%, 0.5 percentage points higher than the current forecast.
"A downward revision of the 2014 forecast growth in spending for telecom services - a segment that accounts for more than 40% of total IT spending - from 1.9% to 1.2% is the main reason behind this overall IT spending growth reduction," says Gordon.
"A number of factors are involved, including the faster-than-expected growth of wireless-only households, declining voice rates in China, and a more frugal usage pattern among European customers. The latter coincides in Western Europe with a breakout of fierce price competition among communications service providers to retain customers and attract new ones."
The data centre systems spending growth outlook for 2014 has been cut from 2.9% in Gartner's previous forecast, to 2.6%. The firm argues this is mainly due to a reduction in the forecast for external controller-based storage and enterprise communications applications. These segments represent 32% of total data centre system end-user spending.
Gartner has slightly revised downward the IT services compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017. The largest contributor to this revision comes from reductions in IT outsourcing - specifically in colocation, hosting and data centre outsourcing growth rates.
"We are seeing CIOs increasingly reconsidering data centre build-out and instead planning faster-than-expected moves to cloud computing. Despite these small reductions, we continue to anticipate consistent 4% to 5% annual growth through 2017," says Gordon.
Share
