IT spending forecasts shrivel

Filed in archive CIO on July 7, 2010

© Otto Phokus

Gartner is pulling back on their forecasts for increased IT spending for 2010, lowering the world-wide increase from the predicted 5.3% increase over 2009 to a 3.9% increase coming to $3.35 trillion as the global economic situation starts to stumble again.

Hardware is the big winner, surprisingly (or not, if you are of the opinion that the whole cloud thing is just a fad) with a 9% boost. Services come in at the low end with only a 2.9% increase predicted. You can find further breakdowns in the press release here.

This information may be of less use to CIOs, who are already well aware that their budgets haven't been exploding with the growth that many organizations sought in 2010, than to vendors who cater to enterprise IT. It should, however, serve as something of a wake-up call to CIOs that doing business in the old ways isn't going to cut it in the new, ramshackle economy that isn't seeing the hoped-for U-shaped recovery pattern. That's why the hardware expenditures surprise me; I'm aware that people have been holding off on infrastructure upgrades for the past couple of years and are probably hungry to make them now. I'm also of the opinion that putting big investments into your data center when the potential uses for all that infrastructure are still tentative at best is a poor allocation of resources.