Global spending on IT will grow 3.3% to $3.3 trillion next
year, reversing the worst slump the industry has seen, says market
analyst Gartner.
Gartner said worldwide spending on IT in 2009 dipped 5.2%, and
enterprise IT spending fell 6.9%.
Gartner warned IT leaders not to be overly optimistic. "While
the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not
recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012," said Peter
Sondergaard, senior vice-president at Gartner and global head of
research.
"2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth,"
he said. More than half of CIOs would see zero growth in their
budgets before things improved in 2011, he said.
The hardware market has suffered most, with spending forecast to
total $317bn in 2009, a 16.5% decline. Hardware spending would be
flat in 2010, Gartner said.
Worldwide telecom spending would slip 4% in 2009 to nearly
$1.9tn before rising 3.2% next year.
Worldwide IT services would hit $781bn in 2009, and grow 4.5%
percent in 2010, it said. But spending on software would slide 2.1%
before bouncing back to 4.8% growth in 2010.
Emerging regions would grow strongly but Silicon Valley was no
longer in the driver's seat anymore, Sondergaard said. "By 2012,
the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT
in these economies will directly influence product features,
service structures, and the overall IT industry," he said.
IT leaders had to consider three key issues in preparing their
2010 budgets, he said. These were the shift from capital
expenditure to operational expenditure, ageing hardware, and the
need to build compelling business cases for the IT budget.
Sondergaard said ideas like cloud services would speed up the
shift to operational rather than capital spending because cloud
made IT costs "scalable and elastic".
"CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall
financial performance of an organisation. For public companies,
they must show how IT improves earnings per share," he said.
Firms were likely to delay purchases of servers, PCs and
printers into 2010, he said. This would result in more hardware
failures and disruptions to service.
Sondergaard said some one million servers, 3% of the global
installed base, should have been replaced last year. This would
double in 2010.
"If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10% of the server
installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,"
Sondergaard said. "CFOs need to understand impact this has on
enterprise risk, but it's up to CIOs to get it across."
Sondergaard said IT leaders could no longer factor IT as a
percentage of revenue. "CIOs must benchmark IT according to
business impact," he said.
As a result they would have to pay more attention to business
intelligence applications, virtualisation, and social media,
particularly as they addressed the over-60s, now the most crucial
market segment, Sondergaard said.
Key issues for the future are:
• Context-aware computing, which would include location,
presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to
anticipate an end user's immediate needs.
• Operational technology, in which ambient devices, sensors, and
software control or monitor physical assets and processes in
real-time, increasing the need for a unified view of information
covering business process and control systems.
• Pattern-based strategy, in which businesses seek early
competitive advantage by finding, modelling, and adapting to
exploit leading indicators that form patterns in the
marketplace.
"A pattern-based strategy will allow an organisation not only to
understand better what's happening now in terms of demand, but also
to detect leading indicators of change. From this they can identify
and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than
continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance,"
Sondergaard said.