Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Reach $3.8 Trillion in 2014
January 06, 2014
Share this

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.8 trillion in 2014, a 3.1 percent increase from 2013 spending of $3.7 trillion, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.

In 2013, the market experienced flat growth, growing 0.4 percent year over year.

Spending on devices (including PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones and tablets) contracted 1.2 percent in 2013, but it will grow 4.3 percent in 2014. Gartner analysts said convergence of the PC, ultramobiles (including tablets) and mobile phone segments, as well as erosion of margins, will take place as differentiation will soon be based primarily on price instead of devices' orientation to specific tasks.

Enterprise software spending growth continues to be the strongest throughout the forecast period. The 2014 annual growth rate is expected to grow 6.8 percent. Customer relationship management and supply chain management (SCM) experienced a period of strong growth.

“Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts. Investment will also be aligned to B2B analytics, particularly in the SCM space, where annual spending is expected to grow 10.6 percent in 2014,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner. “The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post sales processes.”

Last quarter, Gartner's forecast for 2014 IT spending growth in US dollars was 3.6 percent, a 0.5 percentage points higher than the current forecast.

"A downward revision of the 2014 forecast growth in spending for telecom services — a segment that accounts for more than 40 percent of total IT spending — from 1.9 percent to 1.2 percent is the main reason behind this overall IT spending growth reduction," said Gordon. "A number of factors are involved, including the faster-than-expected growth of wireless-only households, declining voice rates in China and a more frugal usage pattern among European customers. The latter coincides in Western Europe with a breakout of fierce price competition among communications service providers to retain customers and attract new ones."

The data center systems spending growth outlook for 2014 has been cut from 2.9 percent in our previous forecast to 2.6 percent. This is mainly due to a reduction in the forecast for external controller-based storage and enterprise communications applications. These segments represent 32 percent of total data center system end-user spending.

Gartner has slightly revised downward the IT services compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017. The largest contributor to this revision comes from reductions in IT outsourcing — specifically, in colocation, hosting and data center outsourcing growth rates.

"We are seeing CIOs increasingly reconsidering data center build-out and instead planning faster-than-expected moves to cloud computing. Despite these small reductions, we continue to anticipate consistent four to five percent annual growth through 2017," said Gordon.

Share this

The Latest

September 19, 2024

As businesses and individuals increasingly seek to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud has become a critical enabler of AI's transformative power. Cloud platforms allow organizations to seamlessly scale their AI capabilities, hosting complex machine learning (ML) models while providing the flexibility needed to meet evolving business needs ... However, the promise of AI in the cloud brings significant challenges ...

September 18, 2024

The business case for digital employee experience (DEX) is clear: more than half (55%) of office workers say negative experiences with workplace technology impact their mood/morale and 93% of security professionals say prioritizing DEX has a positive impact on an organization's cybersecurity efforts, according to the 2024 Digital Employee Experience Report: A CIO Call to Action, a new report from Ivanti ...

September 17, 2024

For IT leaders, a few hurdles stand in the way of AI success. They include concerns over data quality, security and the ability to implement projects. Understanding and addressing these concerns can give organizations a realistic view of where they stand in implementing AI — and balance out a certain level of overconfidence many organizations seem to have — to enable them to make the most of the technology's potential ...

September 16, 2024

For the last 18 years — through pandemic times, boom times, pullbacks, and more — little has been predictable except one thing: Worldwide cloud spending will be higher this year than last year and a lot higher next year. But as companies spend more, are they spending more intelligently? Just how efficient are our modern SaaS systems? ...

September 12, 2024

The OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice ... Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education ...

September 11, 2024

A silo is, by definition, an isolated component of an organization that doesn't interact with those around it in any meaningful way. This is the antithesis of collaboration, but its effects are even more insidious than the shutting down of effective conversation ...

September 10, 2024

New Relic's 2024 State of Observability for Industrials, Materials, and Manufacturing report outlines the adoption and business value of observability for the industrials, materials, and manufacturing industries ... Here are 8 key takeaways from the report ...

September 09, 2024

For mission-critical applications, it's often easy to justify an investment in a solution designed to ensure that the application is available no less than 99.99% of the time — easy because the cost to the organization of that app being offline would quickly surpass the cost of a high availability (HA) solution ... But not every application warrants the investment in an HA solution with redundant infrastructure spanning multiple data centers or cloud availability zones ...

September 05, 2024

The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data ... 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement. To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment ...

September 04, 2024

The growing adoption of efficiency-boosting technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps counteract staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and talent gaps, while giving employees more time to focus on strategic projects. This trend is especially evident in the government contracting sector, where, according to Deltek's 2024 Clarity Report, 34% of GovCon leaders rank AI and ML in their top three technology investment priorities for 2024, above perennial focus areas like cybersecurity, data management and integration, business automation and cloud infrastructure ...