IT Outsourcing Services Spending to Top $250 Billion in 2012: Gartner

eWeek: According to research firm Gartner, the worldwide market for IT outsourcing will likely climb 2.1 percent this year to reach $251.7 billion. Much of that increase will come from growth in cloud computing, where spending is likely to rise 48.7 percent to $5 billion.

“Change is afoot in the AO [application outsourcing] market. The burdens of managing the legacy portfolio, along with the limitations of IT budgets, have shifted the enterprise buyers to be cautious and favor a more evolutionary approach to other application services, such as software as a service (SaaS),” said Gartner’s Bryan Britz. “New applications will largely be packaged and/or SaaS-deployed in order to extend and modernize the portfolio in an incremental manner. While custom applications will remain ‘core’ for many organizations, the trend in the next few years to SaaS enablement in the cloud will reflect in the growth of the AO outlook.”

In contrast, Gartner predicted that data center outsourcing will decline 1 percent this year.