Gartner Predicts Tech Spending Will Hit $3.7 Trillion Next Year

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At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, senior VP Peter Sondergaard predicted that tech spending will continue to rise in the coming years. He also noted that most tech spending now occurs outside of the IT department and “Every budget is becoming an IT budget.”

InformationWeek’s Eric Lundquist reported, “For those interested in trying to track IT spending, Gartner predicted at its conference that worldwide IT spending will surpass $3.7 trillion in 2013, which is a 3.8% increase from 2012. Major growth drivers include big data projects, cloud computing, and mobile. Worldwide IT spending will surpass $4 trillion by 2015.”

“Twelve years ago technology spending outside of IT was 20 percent of total technology spending; it will become almost 90 percent by the end of the decade, according to Gartner, Inc. Much of this change is being driven by the digitization of companies’ revenue and their services,” noted a Gartner press release. “The Nexus of Forces is leading this transformation. The Nexus is the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios.”

PCMag’s Michael J. Miller wrote, “‘In less than two years, iPads will be more common than BlackBerrys,’ Sondergaard said, with 20 percent of sales forces using iPads as the primary delivery platform. By 2017, tablets or hybrid devices will dominate, and by the end of the decade, he predicted more than half of the devices used by employees will be purchased by the employee. Therefore, you need to deliver apps to devices you don’t own and you must ‘design for openness.'”

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan said the “big takeaways” from Sondergaard’s talk included the following:

“80 percent of businesses are using SaaS.”
“Cloud will develop and transform with or without IT’s support.”
“Corporate IT needs to think mobile first in all designs.”
“10 organizations in the U.S. will each spend more than $1 billion on social media in 2016.”
“Consumers will spend more disposable income on technology spending. Consumer tech spending was 3% of disposable income in 2011. By 2015 will be 3.5 percent of spending.”
“Security infrastructure will have to be rethought completely because it could hinder progress.”
“1.9 million IT jobs will be created in the U.S.”