IT growth in negative terrain: Gartner

Como es bueno estar informado de la nueva tierra donde viviremos, pues hoy encontre esta noticia que no me gusto pero nada, pero que se le va a hacer...

Andrew Colley | November 11, 2008

WORLDWIDE ICT spending growth could reverse into negative territory as early as next year, technology analyst firm Gartner said.

Gartner has been unearthing progressively more negative sentiments among some of the biggest IT buyers across the world since it began interviewing chief information officers for its annual IT management survey in September.

After interviewing around 400 executives representing about $60 billion worth of the world’s IT spend each year four weeks ago Gartner had forecast IT spending growth would hover around 3.3 per cent for the 2009 calendar year.

Today Peter Sondergaard senior vice president of Gartner Global Research said that the company had revised its forecasts downward after pushing its interview tally to around 800 CIOs representing over $100 billion worth of IT spend.

Gartner's current IT spending growth forecast hovers between 0 and 2.3 per cent and, if the recession strikes the major economies hard, it could go into reverse and sink to -2.5 per cent.

Only as late two weeks ago Gartner's worst-case forecast set IT spending growth at 2.3 per cent.

The worst case scenario is based on the presumption that recession in the major economies is irreversible.

"The presumption is that you get to a true economic defined recession in the US and in all of the major economies in Europe and that you have an impact in South America and in Africa that is substantial - not necessarily negative growth from budget perspective but substantial. It also presumes that although you retain some level of GDP growth in Asia and it will be positive it will probably not be enough to maintain average IT budget growth globally," Mr Sondergaard said.

Mr Sondergaard said that hardware suppliers would be the worst hit by the worldwide financial crisis as companies sought ways to hold off on big spending projects.

The impact on software companies would come later, Mr Sondergaard said.

"In IT budgets there's almost something like a safety net underneath what can happen rapidly. The safety net you have is in software contracts. If you could break them it gets really bad but generally you wait for the update cycle," he said.

"What will happen short-term which we're already starting to see is that people are delaying hardware acquisition and particularly things in the distributor space such as peripheral equipment, notebooks, (desktops) which have some implications then for the software that runs on them."

Gartner said that companies would increasingly turn to cost optimisation technologies such as server virtualisation and internet telephony.