Worldwide IT spending will grow 3% to $3.6 trillion, Gartner has forecast, slightly more than it had previously predicted.
Gartner researcher Richard Gordon said that the market has stabilised despite "the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, and a slowdown in China", but added there had been little change in business confidence, suggesting that IT spend would remain cautious.
Enterprise spending on public cloud was picked out as a bright spot from Gartner’s research, with companies expected to spend $109 billion on public cloud services in 2012, up 20% from $91 billion in 2011.
Gordon said that while business processing as a service (BPaas), such as hosted call centre services, account for the majority of enterprise cloud usage, spending is growing faster on the cloud services such as infrastructure, platforms and software.
Gartner’s analysts said that IT services will be one of the slowest growing market segments in 2012, but they also noted that traditional management consultancy itself is becoming increasingly technology-driven, with as analytics becoming increasingly needed to make sense of complex business environments.
Overall, telecoms services remained the largest market segment, worth $1.6 billion. Gartner predicted it would grow the slowest in 2012, with sales just 1.4% higher than 2011. However, Gartner said it expects growth for the telecom services segment to come not only from new connections in emerging markets, but also from the increasing use of connected devices in mature markets.
