Dollar's decline drives IT spend in 2010

Separately hardware spend has been "driven by consumer spending on mobile PCs."

Consumer mobile PCs driving IT spending in 2010

Analyst Gartner predicts worldwide IT spending to reaching $3.4tn (£2.2tn) in 2010, and over $3.5tn (£2.3tn) in 2011.

The increase represents a growth of 5.3 per cent in 2010, primarily owing to the dollar’s weakness on the currency markets.

Gartner research vice president Richard Gordon said that four percentage points of that is the result of a decline in the value of the dollar.

Speaking on a YouTube video, Gordon said that when the effect of exchange rates is stripped out, “that growth rate figure of 5.3 per cent is more like 1.5 to 2 per cent”.

Separately, Gordon said that Gartner had significantly revised upwards its predictions for hardware sector spend, which has been "driven by consumer spending on mobile PCs”.

Gartner is also seeing some growth in the enterprise space owing to incremental improvements in the global economy.

“There’s still a lot of caution in the business space, particularly within larger enterprises, which are constrained by CIO and CFO IT spend budgets,” he added.

There was some pent-up demand for hardware driving enterprise IT spending, but Gordon said consumer spending would outstrip that in 2010.