Johannesburg, 17 Jul 2012
Global information technology spending is set to reach $3.6 trillion this year, representing a 3% increase from last year.
This is according to analyst firm Gartner, which notes there has been little change in business confidence and consumer sentiment in the past quarter, and that the short-term outlook calls for continued cautious IT spending across the hardware, software, IT service and telecoms sectors, where growth for 2012 sits in a narrow 2% to 4% range.
The research firm also notes that while the challenges facing global economic growth persist - the Eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China - the outlook has at least stabilised.
In contrast to the rather lacklustre growth outlook for overall IT spending, Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012.
By 2016, Gartner anticipates that enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion.
“Business process as a service still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service are growing faster,” says Richard Gordon, research VP at Gartner.
Furthermore, Gartner notes that worldwide IT services spending is forecast to reach $864 billion in 2012, a 2.3% increase from 2011.
It adds that demand for consulting services is expected to remain high due to the complexity of environments for global business and technology leaders.
Gartner analysts say consulting itself is becoming increasingly technology-based, with the rise of analytics and big data having deep implications on the future of consulting services.
Earlier this year, fellow market research firm IDC predicted the South African IT services market will hit R40 billion this year.
IDC noted that the total South African IT services market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 8.7% to exceed $17 billion in 2015.
A recent ITWeb survey also discovered that the majority of South African organisations appear to be targeting modest growth this year - almost 40% of respondents are expecting growth of 6% to 15%.
According to Gartner, the global telecoms services market continues to be the largest IT spending market.
It adds that telecoms services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in emerging markets, but also from mature markets with the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets, gaming and other consumer electronics devices.
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