Gartner IT Forecast for $2.7 Trillion in 2012

Here are some caveats I advise when looking at spending forecasts.

1. Use the numbers as a guide, not as the literal truth.

2. Stuff changes

3. Technology can change everything.

Okay, with those caveats in mind. Here are some numbers offered up at the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. Spending is slowing but increases are still on the way with worldwide enterprise IT spending projected to total $2.7 trillion in 2012 which represents a 3.9% increase from 2011. This is down from the 5.9% expected increase in 2011. After 2012, growth continues to sputter along in the 3.8% range. Overall technology growth (of which enterprise spending is a part will be in the 4.6% to 4.8% over the next four years. Within those numbers are some big spenders according to Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research. Sondergaard claimed that there are 350 companies that will invest more than $1 billion each in IT.

The fastest growing chunk of IT spending talked about at Gartner was cloud computing. Cloud computing currently reprsents only about 3% of enterprise IT spending (in 2010) which totaled $74 billion on public cloud services in 2010, but is growing five times faster than overall IT spending and will grow annually at a 19% rate through 2015. The rise in tablet computing will be equally dramatic with the current 20 million (2010) tablets in use rising to 900 million by 2016.

By 2014, private app stores will be deployed by 60 percent of IT organizations. Also by 2014, the installed base of devices based on moible operating systems will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based systems.