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Technology: Gartner Scales Back IT 2012 Growth Estimates
IT budgets grew by 6.9 percent in 2011 to $3.7 trillion. But the rate of growth is expected to slow in 2012. Worldwide IT revenues for 2012 are now projected to be $3.8 trillion in 2012, up 3.7 percent from a year ago — that’s down from an earlier projection of 4.6 percent. The 2012 IT spending forecast was prepared and presented by Gartner.
Growth in all four major areas of IT (computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services, and telecommunications) are expected to slow. Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, explained some of the reasons for the slowdown as “faltering global economic growth, the eurozone crisis and the impact of Thailand’s floods on hard-disk drive (HDD) production have all taken their toll on the outlook for IT spending.”
Europe’s problems are also partly to blame for the downgraded growth estimate. Gordon said that “with the eurozone crisis causing uncertainty for both businesses and consumers in Western Europe we have adjusted our forecast, and we expect IT spending in Western Europe to decline 0.7 percent in 2012.”
Gordon said that “Thailand has been a major hub for hard-drive manufacturing, both for finished goods and components. We estimate the supply of hard drives will be reduced by as much as 25 percent (and possibly more) during the next six to nine months. Rebuilding the destroyed manufacturing facilities will also take time and the effects of this will continue to ripple throughout 2012 and very likely into 2013.” This problem is likely to only further fuel the growth of the tablet market — tablets use flash memory rather than hard disk drives.
A parallel study by InformationWeek found that 56 percent of companies expect to increase their IT spending with only 30 percent putting a freeze on hiring and spending. Only 16 percent of companies were forecasting cuts to IT this year. Technologies like big data, social media and tablets are driving much of the increases in spending. The numbers are up compared to just two years ago when only 46 percent of companies predicted increases in IT spending and a quarter of companies were cutting IT budgets.
And there is also some expected improvement in the IT jobs picture. InformationWeek found that 25 percent of companies now say that they are hiring for 2012 with less than 10 percent of companies saying that they were scaling back IT positions.
The five areas that InformationWeek identified as areas where new IT spending will be highest this year are as follows:
- Cloud Computing
- Social Computing
- Mobile Computing
- Big Data
- Data Center Infrastructure (think virtualization)
