Global business IT spend rising despite recession, says Gartner report

Spend should reach £2.3tr in 2012, up three per cent on last year

Analysis group Gartner expects world IT spending to hit $3.6tr (£2.3tr) by the end of 2012 - a surprising rise of three per cent on 2011, and a half of a percentage point higher than Gartner had originally estimated for the year.

"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist - the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China - the outlook has at least stabilised," research vice president at Gartner, Richard Gordon, said in a statement.

However, Gordon also stressed that current economic conditions remain very challenging.

"There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending," said Gordon.

The outlook for cloud, however, is more encouraging, with Gartner projecting enterprise spending growing from $91bn (£58.6bn) in 2011 to $109bn (£70.2bn) in 2012, with an expected $207bn (£133bn) in 2016. Gartner cited a growing variety in types of cloud spending as a major contributor here.

"Business process as a service still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by organisations, but other areas such as platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service are growing faster," said Gordon.

Gartner said that general spending on IT services will reach $86bn (£55.4bn), an increase of 2.3 per cent on last year.