Cisco, others may see a 4% hike in IT spending

Gartner lowers earlier 2012 forecast by 1% but it and Piper Jaffrey see an uptick from 2011

Gartner has lowered its IT spending forecast for 2012 down to 3.7% from 4.6%, meaning companies like Cisco and its competitors will be fighting harder for fewer bucks. Gartner says that growth rates in computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services and telecom equipment and services, will slow this year due to a series of factors:

• The slow recovery of the global economy
• Europe's fiscal instability
• The impact of the Thailand floods on hard disk drive production, and the 6-9 month ripple effect of that

All in all, IT spending will be about $3.8 trillion this year, Gartner now says. That's roughly $100 billion less than its earlier 4.6% growth estimates.

Gartner expects telecom equipment will see the strongest growth, rising 6.9% to $475 billion, only slightly lower than 2011's 7.7% growth rate. But telecom services will only rise 2.3% to $1.74 trillion, down substantially from the 6.1% hike in 2011.

The firm also lowered its average annual growth projection for IT spending through 2015, to 5% from 5.4%, according to this post from AllThingsDigital. A fractional change, but one that still amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars, ATD notes.

Now a counterpoint: A survey of CIOs and CFOs conducted by Piper Jaffrey projects IT spending to increase 4% to 5% in 2012 - more in line with Gartner's previous projections of 4.6% growth, notes this post in Forbes:

Piper's survey found that less discretionary items - storage, security, servers - should generate the highest incremental growth this year, with slower growth for more discretionary items like WAN optimization, application delivery controllers and unified communications.

The Piper survey included 60 company CFOs and CIOs across 13 industries. Other findings of note are that 51% say they are likely to increase spending on outsourced data centers - 71% reported running their own data centers.

Forty-six percent plan to deploy tablets this year, while 43% will increase spending on private cloud infrastructure. Thirty-nine percent said servers are most in need of a refresh vs. only 15% citing PCs.

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• Server
• Cloud Computing
• data center
• IT spending
• telecommunications