Consumers and Communications to Lead Tech Recovery

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press Apple customers test the iPhone in Palo Alto, Calif.

The qualified good news from Gartner’s new forecast of technology spending isn’t really surprising. Analysts there see a recovery in worldwide spending on information technology in 2010, after a 5.2 percent decline this year, the worst global falloff ever.

The recovery won’t be a vigorous rebound, Gartner predicts in its report released on Monday, but a modest rise of 3.3 percent to $3.3 trillion. More sobering, Gartner projects that the technology market will not reach 2008 buying levels until 2012.

Consumers, communications services and government stimulus programs will be the three main engines of recovery in technology spending, according to Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president for research for Gartner.

The first two, Mr. Sondergaard said in an interview, are closely related. Consumers are increasingly using all kinds of communications services, especially on their cellphones but also on personal computers. That demand then pulls all sorts of investment by telecommunications companies and others in software, technology services and hardware. “So what you get is this cascading effect driven by the consumer and where enterprise technology is pulled along at the end of the cycle,” he said.

Government stimulus programs worldwide, Mr. Sondergaard said, will lift demand for technology goods mostly in three markets: health care, utilities and government itself. And look for hardware to continue to lag, as companies and government agencies more and more buy technology as a service, notably “cloud” computing offerings hosted from the supplier’s data centers.

The cloud model, he said, also makes technology investment more flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances — so business customers assume less risk. “We’ll see an accelerated move from capital spending to operational spending in technology budgets,” Mr. Sondergaard said.