Gartner cuts 2010 IT spending forecast
By Dean • Jul 2nd, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Gartner
Research giant Gartner has reduced its global IT spending forecast from a previous forecasted year-on-year growth of 5.3 per cent to a forecasted year-on-year growth of 3.9 per cent.
Gartner’s new forecast pegs worldwide spending on IT – across the entire industry – at $3.35 trillion for 2010, a 3.9 per cent increase over 2009.
Europe to blame
The current Euro debt crisis, coupled with the dollar strengthening against the Euro, has put depressive ‘pressure on U.S.-dollar-denominated IT spending growth’, Richard Gordon, Vice President of Research at Gartner, said in a statement.
However, as Gordon adds, Western Europe accounts for less than a quarter of global IT spending, meaning the more positive outlooks from other regions would mitigate the bearish approach in Western Europe. Gordon writes in a blog post that even in the face of massive cutbacks in Western Europe, this ‘would likely only result in a one to two percent reduction in global IT’ and that the impact this would have on growth across the board would be tiny. If you want to dig deeper into the thinking behind the Gartner IT spending revision, Gordon’s whole blog post is well worth a read.
Hardware still blazing ahead
- Photo: Microsoft
The Gartner IT spending forecast accounts for the entire industry, from hardware to software and including service level. The one area in this triangle of concerns that’s blazing ahead unabated in growth is in the hardware space, with Gartner expecting that sector to grow 9.1 per cent year-on-year to reach $365 billion in 2010. This is attributed to strong growth in PC shipments as well as growing demand for mobile devices on the parts of consumers. The spillover success of Windows 7 is taking effect throughout the industry, with Gartner linking the strong hardware growth to enterprise-level migration to Microsoft’s new operating system.
Taking a crude snapshot of the industry by looking at our users, have you bought any additional computing hardware in this calendar year as opposed to last, or are you feeling the pinch, still?
Tags for this article: 2010 IT spending forecast, Gartner, global IT, windows 7
