IT spending could reach £3.5 trillion in 2017

Global IT spending will hit 3.5 trillion in 2017, according to analyst firm Gartner's latest forecast.

The figure, which represents an increase of 2.4% over last year's IT spending, is the second time that Gartner's 2017 spending forecast has been revised. The firm initially predicted a growth of 2.7%, but marked this down to 1.4% in April thanks to a rise in the value of the dollar versus other currencies.

Gartner has now raised its growth prediction again - thanks to the dollar falling in value - and while it is still less than was initially forecast, the figure is substantially up from 2016, where total IT spending growth was just 0.3%.

The biggest increases will be seen in the enterprise software market, where the firm says spending will swell by more than 7.5%. Devices (including PCs, tablets and smartphones) will grow by almost 4% to a total value of $654 billion. Other areas such as data centre systems and communications services will have minimal, but still positive, growth.

"With the increased adoption of SaaS-based enterprise applications, there also comes an increase in acceptance of IT operations management tools that are also delivered from the cloud," said John-David Lovelock, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

"These cloud-based tools allow infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations to more rapidly add functionality and adopt newer technologies to help them manage faster application release cycles. If the I&O team does not monitor and track the rapidly changing environment, it risks infrastructure and application service degradation, which ultimately impacts the end-user experience and can have financial as well as brand repercussions."