IT spending in Europe, the Middle East and Africa will fall by 3.6% this year and inch up by just 1.4% in 2013, according to the latest figures from analyst company Gartner.
This year has been a "pessimistic year for IT spending in Europe”, said Gartner’s senior vice president and global head of research Peter Sondergaard at the Gartner Symposium / IT Expo 2012 in Barcelona yesterday.
The decline in spending was especially pronounced in Western Europe, where overall IT expenditure dropped 5.9%.
“However, the EMEA region will return to growth in 2013 and continue to grow through 2016 when spending will reach $1.247 trillion,” Sondergaard said.
The mobile device market is currently the “bright spot” of the IT industry, Sondergaard added. “We are seeing tablets and smartphones significantly outpace purchases of traditional PCs,” he said.
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Devices, which includes mobile devices, will see the highest increase in spending, Gartner predicts, growing from $193 billion in 2012 to $208 billion in 2013.
Spending in EMEA on mobile devices alone, including notebook PCs, mobile phones, ultrabooks and tablets will amount to $136 billion in 2012, reaching $188 billion in 2016, Gartner said.
In Western Europe, both consumers and businesses are buying tablets, Gartner said, increasing total mobile device market growth to 8%. This contrasts with a decline of 5% in the mobile PC market in Western Europe, it said.
By 2016, two-thirds of the workforce will have a smartphone or tablet device, Gartner said, requiring traditional software providers to rewrite applications for tablet-based environments which will result in a strong increase in software spending. Gartner predicts spending on software will grow from $83 billion in 2012 to $86 billion in 2013.
Gartner said the creation of new jobs to manage big data projects will change the landscape of IT. According to Gartner, over the next three years, together with the North America and Japan regions, EMEA will be the most active region using big data.
Globally, Gartner said 4.4 million IT jobs will be created to support big data, with 1.3 million IT jobs being created in EMEA, including 1.2 million IT jobs in Western Europe alone.
