IT spending will grow 4.1 percent in 2014 against 4.5 percent last year, said IDC.
The crisis in Ukraine, slowdown in China and general sense of uncertainty are some of the reasons for the revision in IDC forecast for 2014 from the earlier forecast of 4.6 percent.
In mature economies, organizations will take advantage of a more stable business climate to replace aging infrastructure including servers, storage, and network equipment.
In some emerging markets, stabilization of the economy after the slowdown that began in mid-2013 could drive a period of catch-up spending, especially in China where IT spending has cooled over the past 12 months, said IDC.
Excluding mobile phones, growth in 2014 will accelerate from 2.9 percent to 3.1 percent due to the pickup in infrastructure investment and the related downstream effect on IT services revenues, said IDC.
IDC said around 10 percent of software spending will have moved to the Cloud by the end of 2014, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will represent 15 percent of all spending on servers and storage.
While this is creating significant disruption for IT vendors targeting traditional IT budgets, it is also driving equally significant short-term opportunities for those vendors that successfully capture mindshare for their Cloud-based solutions.
Meanwhile, both Cloud and traditional spending will be driven by the underlying pent-up demand for server and storage capacity, driven in turn by the previous, explosive growth of mobile devices that are now generating an ever-increasing volume of data.
The opportunity to extract value from this data is driving strong demand for analytics tools and Big Data solutions. Many organizations will choose a gradual approach for their journey to the Cloud, with security, reliability and regulatory factors in mind, implementing hybrid and private cloud solutions. As a result, both Cloud and traditional IT spending will benefit from these drivers in the next 2-3 years.
InfotechLead News Team
