Global IT spending is set to reach $3.6 trillion in 2012, up 3 percent from $3.5 trillion in 2011.
“While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilized. 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,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner.
Public cloud services are expected to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012 and the enterprise spending to reach $207 billion in the year 2016.
Business process as a service (BPaaS) 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.
Worldwide IT service spending is likely to reach $864 billion in 2012, a 2.3 percent increase from 2011 (see Table 1). Demand for consulting services is expected to remain high due to the complexity of environments for global business and technology leaders. Consulting itself is becoming increasingly technology-based with the rise of analytics and big data, having deep implications on the future of consulting services.
| 2011 spending | 2011 growth % | 2012 spending | 2012 growth % | 2013 spending | 2013 growth % | |
| Computing Hardware | 404 | 7.4 | 420 | 3.4 | 448 | 6.6 |
| Enterprise Software | 269 | 9.8 | 281 | 4.3 | 301 | 6.9 |
| IT Services | 845 | 7.7 | 864 | 2.3 | 905 | 4.8 |
| Telecom Equipment | 340 | 17.5 | 377 | 10.8 | 408 | 8.3 |
| Telecom Services | 1,663 | 6.0 | 1,686 | 1.4 | 1,725 | 2.3 |
| ALL IT | 3,523 | 7.9 | 3,628 | 3.0 | 3,768 | 4.4 |
The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market. Telecom services growth is expected to come not only from net connections, especially in emerging markets, but also in mature markets from the uptake of multiple connected devices, such as media tablets, gaming and other consumer electronics devices
