Western European public IT spend set for five per cent slump

Gartner figures reveal tough times ahead as CIOs are squeezed

Western European IT spending will decline this year as government purse strings are vigorously tightened, research from Gartner suggests.

Across EMEA, IT spending is predicted to decline 1.4 per cent to €604bn (£518bn) this year. Spending in western Europe, which accounts for 80 per cent of the regional total, will fall 1.8 per cent.

For 2012, spending growth is pegged at 2.3 per cent for the EMEA region, and just 1.5 per cent for western Europe. Government chips in more than any other sector, accounting for a fifth of western European IT spend. The public sector technology spending pot is set to shrink 4.8 per cent in 2011, and 1.7 per cent next year.

Peter Sondergaard, global head of research at Gartner, claimed CIOs must reinvent their jobs to ensure they remain relevant.

"CIOs must build a realistic budget right now to lead from the front, irrespective of market growth," he said. "By 2014, CIOs will have lost effective control of 25 per cent of their organisation's IT spending, and by 2017, chief marketing officers may have a bigger IT budget than CIOs do. It is time for CIOs to take the lead and re-imagine their role."

One bright spot for the market is the cloud computing arena, with €16bn projected to be spent across EMEA on public cloud services this year. This is forecast to rise to €20bn in 2012, with public cloud spending predicted to grow 10 times faster than the wider market until at least 2015.

Daryl Plummer, managing vice president of Gartner, said: "In the post-modern business, we will witness the emergence of cloud brokerages, which will act as specialist intermediaries between customers and cloud service providers. Cloud brokerages aggregate, integrate, govern and customise cloud services to make those services more specific to the needs of the customers. IT leaders must engage cloud brokers to make it easier to trade in a world of specialists."