Gartner: Device spending to rebound in 2014

But market watcher curbs overall 2014 IT spending growth forecast

Gartner has issued a new year's gift to the channel by forecasting that spending on client devices will rebound strongly in 2014, but has cut its overall global IT growth forecast for the year ahead.

After a flat 2013, the market watcher reckons that global IT spending will grow by 3.1 per cent in US dollars to $3.7tn (£2.3tn) this year.

This is 0.5 per cent lower than the previous 3.6 per cent growth forecast Gartner issued last quarter as the analyst downgraded its forecast for telecoms services spending – which represents 40 per cent of the total market – from 1.9 to 1.2 per cent.

Gartner also pruned its growth outlook for datacentre systems from 2.9 to 2.6 per cent as it reduced its forecast for external controller-based storage and enterprise communications applications.

However, after contracting 1.2 per cent in 2013, spending on devices (including PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones and tablets) is set to bounce by 4.3 per cent in 2014 to $697bn, the analyst reckons.

The year will be marked by convergence of the PC, ultramobile (including tablets) and mobile phone segments as differentiation becomes based primarily on price instead of devices' orientation to specific tasks, Gartner said.

Enterprise software spending is set to grow by 6.8 per cent to $320bn in 2014, following five per cent growth in 2013, Gartner said, with CRM and supply chain management experiencing strong growth.

Meanwhile, IT services spending will grow 4.5 per cent to $922bn, Gartner said, well up on the 1.8 per cent growth recorded last year. However, the analyst revised downwards its IT services compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017 as it voiced fears that the rise of cloud would curb growth of colocation, hosting and datacentre outsourcing.

"We are seeing CIOs increasingly reconsidering datacentre build-out and instead planning faster-than-expected moves to cloud computing. Despite these small reductions, we continue to anticipate consistent four to five per cent annual growth through 2017," said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner.