IT industry set for strong growth, spend: Analysts

 It forecast the IT market in the US to grow by 8.4 per cent and the global IT market (in US dollars) by 7.7 per cent.

Forrester Vice-President Andrew Bartels while estimating the business and government purchases of IT goods and services to touch $550 billion and $1574 billion in the US and global markets respectively, said “on an industry basis, US manufacturers, financial services firms, utilities, and healthcare will see the strongest growth in 2010. And on a global basis, the US and Asia Pacific will be standout regions in local currency terms, while the Western and Central Europe expanding at the slowest rate among the regions.”

Dollar depreciation
Likewise, Gartner Inc said that the global IT spending is forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 5.3 per cent increase from IT spending of $3.2 trillion in 2009. Gartner Research President Richard Gordon pointed out that following strong fourth quarter sales, an unseasonably robust hardware supply chain in the first quarter of 2010, combined with continued improvement in the global economy, sets up 2010 for solid IT spending growth.
“However, it’s important to note that nearly 4 percentage points of this growth will be the result of a projected decline in the value of the dollar relative to last year. IT spending in exchange-rate-adjusted dollars will still grow 1.6 per cent this year, after declining 1.4 per cent in 2009.”

Further, global computing hardware spending is forecast to reach $353 billion in 2010, a 5.7 per cent increase from 2009, Gartner said, adding  enterprise hardware spending will grow again in 2010, but will remain below its 2008 level through 2014. Robust consumer spending on mobile PCs will drive hardware spending in 2010.
Spending on storage will enjoy the fastest growth in terms of enterprise spending as the volume of enterprise data that needs to be stored continues to increase.
Near-term spending on servers will be concentrated on lower-end servers; longer-term, server spending will be curtailed by virtualization, consolidation and, potentially, cloud computing.
DH News Service