Spending in information technology is increasing much faster than expected, suggests findings by Gartner, a technology research company.
Gartner says it attributes the new trend to an accelerated shift toward cloud computing and a rush for the associated telecommunications services.
On the whole, an estimated US$3.6 trillion would be spent in information technology in 2012 representing a 3 percent increase. Last year, about US$3.5 trillion was spent.
Gartner’s findings is up from the 2.5 percent increase it projected three months ago. The rise, although meek, is outstanding as it is happening in the face of financial crisis in Europe, slump in China’s economy, stagnated growth in the United States and slow growth in Africa.
Gartner notes that spending on public cloud services will increase by 20 percent to US$109 billion, from $91 billion in 2011.
The expenditure could double, to about to $207 billion by 2016, according to the research firm.
This would however be a relatively small fraction of the total expenditure even as it indicates significant computing power and more resourceful information technology systems.
The major spending in the field, by a long way, stays on telecommunications services.
Gartner projected that companies would spend an estimated $1.69 trillion on telecommunications in 2012, a 1.4 percent leap from last year’s.
Even as the cost of the telecommunications services continues to drop, Gartner says there is an increased demand from the dropping economies, and a rise in demand generated by the rush for connected personal devices including tablets, smartphones and game consoles.
In the enterprise segment, Gartner notes that a majority of cloud investments will be within the areas of business service such as billing systems that run in the cloud.
However, areas notably growing faster at present include software and infrastructure services with the latter as storage and equipment replacement, which was initially on the customer’s premises including phone service.
Over 200 business and technology experts across the globe contributed to the Gartner report.
Gartner said that the experts saw “a 2.3 percent increase, to $864 billion, in fees for technology service.”
