ITWire

In its latest report on the worldwide ICT market, Gartner has revised its 2012 IT spending outlook up slightly from the 2.5 percent projection last quarter.

According to Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, while the challenges facing global economic growth persist, with the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery and a slowdown in China, the outlook for the global IT market has at least stabilised.  However, Gordon says that there has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, and the “short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending."

However, Gartner says that in contrast to the rather “lacklustre growth outlook” for overall IT spending, it expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion this year, and to reach $207 billion by 2016.

"Business process as a service (BPaaS) still 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," Gordon says.

On worldwide IT services spending, Gartner forecasts it will reach $864 billion this year, a 2.3 percent increase from 2011. According to Gartner, demand for consulting services is expected to remain high due to the complexity of environments for global business and technology leaders, and according to Gordon consulting itself is becoming increasingly technology-based with the rise of analytics and big data, having deep implications on the future of consulting services.

Gartner also reports that the global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market, with growth in the sector 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.

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