PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Good news if you are in tech: IT spending is projected to increase 1.4 per cent this year and generate a whopping $3.5 trillion by the end of 2017. The original figure is slightly lower than Gartner’s first projected, with $67 billion cut out of the forecast due to the rising US dollar.
Spending is expected to be driven by a strong mobile phones market as well as sales of printers, PCs and tablets. The mobile phone, tablet and PC market is expected to rise by 1.7 per cent year-on-year, largely due to increased average selling prices and emerging markets in Asia. Upgrades to Windows 10 are equally expected to drive up PC prices and the number of sales.
The global IT services market is also expected to grow by 2.3 per cent in 2017, with changes to certain US policies expected to drive up infrastructure spending both domestic and abroad. Meanwhile the data centre industry is expected to see a very slight 0.3 per cent increase. John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said the server market is slower than the rest of the IT market as enterprises move away from traditional vendors.
"We are seeing a shift in who is buying servers and who they are buying them from," he said. "Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data centre system segment."
Gartner is expected to release more forecasts this week, in reference to new vendors compared to existing markets, the impact of the cloud and the impact on IT spending.
