10 Jul 2009

Falling IT spending 'not that bad'

Businesses have been advised not to pay too much heed to the gloomy news surrounding falling global IT spending at present.

Joanne Morin Correia, managing vice-president for the software market research team at Gartner, noted that the economic downturn will have had an impact on IT spending; however, in general the surge of activity which took place last year means that 2009 was always going to be slower.

"One of the reasons 2009 looks enormously worse is because [the major PC refresh] drove new service sales too and we came off that refresh cycle at the same time as people started to pull back," Ms Correia said.

Research recently published by Gartner showed that global IT expenditure has diminished by six per cent so far this year to £2.1 trillion.

Richard Gordon, research vice-president and head of global forecasting at Gartner, noted that it remains to be seen whether companies will look to increase this level of spending should an economic recovery begin to take place by the end of the year.