According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is expected to reach $3.8 trillion in 2014, witnessing a growth of 3.2 per cent over 2013.
Further, the global spending on devices market (including PCs, ultra mobiles, mobile phones and tablets) is forecast to $689 billion. The research firm forecasts that the demand for highly priced premium mobile phones will slow down with customers in mature countries preferring midtier premium mobile phones, while those in emerging countries would opt for low-end Android-based devices. Gartner has also underlined that the number of traditional PC users continues to contract. Increasingly, consumers are opting to buy premium ultramobiles as notebook replacements and purchasing tablets as additional devices. As market power shifts to the buyer, and key product innovations become ubiquitous, product pricing is becoming the primary differentiator.
Spending on data center systems is projected to reach $143 billion in 2014, a 2.3 percent increase from 2013. In terms of enterprise network equipment trends, cloud and mobility are the biggest demand drivers. Virtualisation and cloud adoption are generating significant market traction for data center Ethernet switches, and the proliferation of mobile endpoints is continuing to drive significant demand for the wireless LAN equipment market.
In the enterprise software market, the research firm expects the spending to be on pace to reach $320 billion by 2014. The enterprise software market is the fastest-growing segment in 2014. The Nexus of Forces (the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information) continues to drive growth across key major software markets, such as customer relationship management, database management systems (DBMSs), data integration tools and data quality tools. In fact, organisational adoption of data management technologies to support the Nexus will result in spending on DBMSs to surpass operating systems, making the former the largest enterprise software market in 2014.
Meanwhile, IT services are forecast to total $964 billion in 2014. IT services buyers are shifting spending from consulting (planning projects) to implementation (doing projects), and Gartner analysts expect steady growth in the IT services market as the economic outlook, and along with it investment sentiment, improves. Further, Gartner forecasts telecom services spending to grow by 1.3 per cent and reach $1.655 trillion by 2014. Fixed voice services continue to decline affecting the balance of wireless-only households in important markets, such as Japan, as well as the migration of enterprise lines due to session initiation protocol trunking, the use of voice over IP to facilitate the connection of a private branch exchange (PBX) to the Internet).
