it spending

Organizations around the world will collectively spend more than $3.6 trillion on IT products and services, Gartner said today.

That sounds like a healthy chunk of change, but it marks only a 3 percent increase from last year when spending totaled around $3.5 trillion. Still, Gartner's latest forecast is a bit more optimistic than the 2.5 percent rise it projected last quarter.

"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist -- the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China -- the outlook has at least stabilized," Richard Gordon, a research vice … Read more

Spending on technology around the world managed to rise last year, despite economic woes in Europe and a severe hard-drive shortage, research firm IDC said yesterday.

Overall, IT spending rose just 5 percent in 2011, but that proved to be a healthy gain in the face of worldwide challenges.

The 5 percent figure was calculated using constant currency, a method that does not take into account fluctuations in the exchange rate. In U.S. dollars, the picture was even rosier, with tech spending rising by almost 9 percent last year.

A surge in demand for smartphones, tablets, and software kicked … Read more

The outlook for IT spending this year isn't quite as rosy as Gartner previously predicted.

Spending on IT products and services is expected to reach $3.8 trillion in 2012, a 3.7 percent rise from last year when spending totaled $3.7 trillion and had climbed by 6.9 percent from 2010.

Released today, the new forecast is a dip from Gartner's prior projection of 4.6 percent growth for this year. The market researcher now believes that all major tech sectors will witness slower gains in spending for 2012.

Spending on telecom equipment will see the … Read more

The IT market staged a healthy rebound last year, with global spending on IT products and services rising 8 percent from 2009 to more than $1.5 trillion, according to IDC's Worldwide Black Book report out today.

The market research firm's 2010 numbers showed the fastest growth rate for the IT industry since 2007.

Factoring in the telecommunications segment, the overall ICT (information and communications technology) market saw spending climb to almost $3 trillion, up 6 percent from 2009. Growth was driven by the need and ability among businesses to finally spend money to refresh their hardware and … Read more

IT spending is still expected to rise this year over 2009, but Gartner believes that European debt problems may put a damper on its previous expectations for growth.

The market researcher said Thursday it has trimmed its estimate for IT spending for 2010 to $3.35 trillion, a gain of 3.9 percent over last year's $3.23 trillion. That marks a lower forecast than the 5.3 percent rise Gartner projected in the first quarter. The company attributed the new outlook to the effects of the devaluation of the euro versus the U.S. dollar.

"The European … Read more

Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.

It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.… Read more

Despite all the nifty, gee-whiz technology that the Web 2.0 craze brought the software industry, it's still stodgy enterprise software that continues to command a significant price tag.

That's because however much we may enjoy Facebooking, Twittering, etc., ultimately we pay for what helps us get our jobs done.

Even so, just a few years ago, if you were a start-up focused on enterprise IT, VCs treated you like a leper, preferring to invest in something with a name like Bungabooboo.com over something that could shave 10 percent from a CIO's operating costs. The one … Read more

Enterprise IT struggles to overcome the risk of vendor lock-in, the risk of IT project delivery failure, and a range of other risks.

However, as Julien Le Nestour expertly elucidates, the biggest risk for enterprise IT is a dearth of user adoption.

With this risk in mind, Le Nestour suggests that enterprise IT revise its strategies for evaluating and purchasing software with the user in mind:

(T)he IT function needs to change its mindset and view of itself. Instead of deploying tools where user adoption is taken for granted, IT leaders must realize they're competing with other applications … Read more

It used to make sense to talk about open source as a separate line item in the enterprise IT lexicon. However, open source has become such a standard way of delivering enterprise IT that maybe it's time to update the lexicon. It no longer makes sense to ask CIOs whether they plan to "deploy open source" as if it's somehow a separate and distinct question from, say, "Do you plan to deploy new database servers?" The questions are largely one and the same.

Apparently Baseline didn't get the memo though a few weeks … Read more