Enterprises to spend $2.5 trillion for IT in 2011

MUMBAI, INDIA: Worldwide enterprise IT spending is forecast to reach $2.5 trillion in 2011, a 3.1 per cent increase from 2010 spending of $2.4 trillion, according to Gartner, Inc.

2010 enterprise IT spending is on track to total $2.4 trillion, a 2.4 per cent increase from 2009. Over the next five years, enterprise IT spending would represent a period of timid and at times lackluster growth with spending totaling $2.8 trillion in 2014.

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, provided the latest outlook for the IT industry today to an audience of more than 7,000 IT leaders at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through October 21.

“Several key vertical industries, such as manufacturing and financial services will not see IT budgets recover to pre-2008 levels before 2012 or 2013,” Sondergaard said. ”Emerging economies continue to be the locomotive of enterprise IT spending, substantially outpacing developed economies.”

The research looked at how during that time IT has transformed business, launched new industries, and helped drive the global economy.

“The transformation in IT spending will accelerate individual corporate change,” added, Sondergaard.

He further added, “We are on a one way trip towards the IT driven intelligence society — driven by the consumer — where growing access to this growing universe of data gives us the opportunity to not only make better decisions, but to make smarter decisions.”

Improvements in IT access and skills can, directly or indirectly, contribute to individual welfare, increase national productivity and output and improve productivity. A broad range of socio-economic benefits are also apparent, including better educational performance and other developmental goals.

According to Sondergaard at the heart of the change, the next 20 years will be intelligence drawn from information.

“Information will be the ‘oil of the 21st century’. It will be the resource running our economy in ways not possible in the past,” he said.

The Four broad trends to support change in IT, and in the economy, the next 10 years would be Cloud, business impact of social computing, Context Aware Computing, Pattern Based Strategy

Cloud computing would transform the IT industry as it will alter the financial model upon which investors look at technology providers, and it will change vertical industries, making the impact of the Internet on the music industry look like a minor bleep.

The second major trend is the business impact of social computing. Not simply more platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, the real impact will come as the underlying ethos, culture and attitudes which shape social computing and have driven growth to date, pervade the enterprise and blur the boundaries between personal and professional activities.

“The rigid business processes which dominate enterprise organizational architectures today are well suited for routine, predictable business activities. But they are poorly suited to support people who’s jobs require discovery, interpretation, negotiation and complex decision-making,” said Sondergaard said.

He added that social computing, not Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, but the technologies and principals behind them would be implemented across and between all organizations, it will unleash yet to be realized productivity growth, it will contribute to economic growth.”

The third major trend impacting IT leaders is Context Aware Computing. The proliferation and availability of wireless technologies — coupled with an explosion of super intelligent devices — notebooks, tablets and smartphones -- in the hands of consumers— linked to cost effective compute and communication capabilities in all physical products — has created a new Internet fabric.

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“This enables the creation of software and services that will blend data, text, graphics, audio and video with context such location, language, desires, feelings. Services not imagined today will use people’s location — whether physical or virtual - as the foundation and then use data that determine your patterns of behavior, your desires,” Sondergaard said. “Context Aware Computing while linear in its impact on IT will have profound impact on organizations, on the way we do business.”

The last trend is Pattern-Based Strategy. A Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek patterns from traditional and non-traditional sources, model their impact, and adapt according to the needs of the pattern.

This builds on pattern-based technologies such as social network analysis, context aware technologies and predictive analytic tools. It will allow IT leaders to seek-out patterns amidst the burgeoning information sources and model future possibilities.

Sondergaard concluded that the combination of these four trends creates an unimaginable force impacting not just IT and the IT industry, but the capability of business and government. Each of these four trends is about driving IT business value. Whether IT acts now or not, the combination of these trends will drive dramatic change in your enterprises’ business model and strategy.