In its quarterly spending forecast for the first quarter of 2013, Gartner Research estimated that total worldwide IT spending will reach $3.8 trillion in 2013. This would represent a 4.1 percent increase in spending compared to last year.
Gartner Research, which employs 1,400 research analysts and consultants, releases its quarterly Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to help IT and business executives identify challenges and opportunities in the IT market.
The spending forecast measures overall IT spending and also breaks it into different categories: devices, data center systems, enterprise software, IT services and telecom services. Gartner predicts that some categories in IT will grow more quickly than others. For example, worldwide spending on devices like PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers will reach $718 billion this year, up nearly 8 percent from 2012.
However, that boost in spending comes largely from premium mobile phones. PC spending is flat, Gartner says in the report, while printer spending has actually declined.
That trend echoes a broader movement in IT spending generally, says John Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. Spending patterns in IT are moving toward more social, mobile and cloud technology. Lovelock writes in the report that the IT industry is making a transition to the latest technologies, moving “from PCs to mobile phones, from servers to storage, from licensed software to cloud.”
The biggest spending market in IT is the telecom services market, making up $1.65 trillion out of the $3.6 trillion spent on IT in 2012, but telecom services are not projected to grow in the next few years. Voice services are declining, the report indicates; only strong growth in mobile data services will prevent the overall telecom category from suffering a decline.
Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner, traces U.S. spending habits back to recent economic shockwaves. While the country avoided the fiscal cliff, he notes in the same report, setbacks like sequestration and the rise of Cyprus’s debt burden are keeping consumers and businesses wary of spending. Still, he adds, these problems are creating “pauses” in discretionary spending, but are not enough to stop IT initiatives.
As IT spending continues to move froward, Gartner Research is also optimistic about employment prospects for IT professionals in the United States. Its report from the fourth quarter of 2012 predicted that the information economy will create a total of 6 million jobs in the United States by 2015. Gartner’s global head of research, Peter Sondergaard, said that 1.9 million IT jobs will be created by 2015 to support big data, and then another three jobs will be created outside of information technology for every big data related position. In addition to big data, two other major growth areas are mobile and social computing.
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