Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Grow 2.1 Percent in 2014 – Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.7 trillion in 2014, a 2.1 percent increase from last year, however, this grow rate is down from earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth.  The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for devices, data center systems and to some extent IT services.

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)

IT services is forecast to total $967 billion in 2014, up 3.8 percent from 2013. Following weak vendor performance in 2013 across multiple geographies and segments, modestly improved spending is expected through 2014. IT outsourcing is growing slower than expected as sharply reduced pricing by the largest vendors is impacting the cloud storage services market. In addition, public cloud services are proving increasingly cannibalistic to more traditional data center outsourcing services. Implementation services are also growing slower than expected as risk-averse buyers remain focused on smaller, safer projects and some of the largest sellers remain focused on maintaining margins over growing revenue. 

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $321 billion, a 6.9 percent increase from 2013. Slightly increased growth expectations for infrastructure software are balanced out by slightly lower growth expected for applications software. Within infrastructure, the database management system (DBMS) software market is expected to have strong growth as DBMS adoption is driven by big data and digitalization initiatives. Slower growth is expected in the applications market, specifically office suites and digital content creation (DCC), which are being impacted by slow PC sales and the rapid move to cloud-based offerings by many organizations and professionals.

Source: Gartner