According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is expected to increase 1.4 percent in 2017. Despite this growth rate being down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 2.7 percent – due in part to the rising U.S. dollar – spending in this area is still predicted to reach $3.5 trillion in 2017.
“The strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”
Driven by strength in mobile phone sales and smaller improvements in sales of printers, PCs and tablets, worldwide spending on devices is projected to grow 1.7 percent in 2017, to reach $645 billion. This is up from negative 2.6 percent growth in 2016.
Additional forecasts show that the data centre system segment is expected to increase 0.3 percent in 2017. While this is up from negative growth in 2016, the segment is experiencing a slowdown in the server market. “We are seeing a shift in who is buying servers and who they are buying them from,” said Lovelock. “Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.”
Lastly, the worldwide IT services market is forecast to grow 2.3 percent in 2017, down from 3.6 percent growth in 2016. The modest changes to the IT services forecast this quarter can be characterised as adjustments to particular geographies as a result of potential changes of direction anticipated regarding U.S. policy — both foreign and domestic.
