Gartner issued what could be an encouraging report for vendors looking for some light at the end of the challenging economic tunnel: Telecom equipment spending could rise 10.8 percent to $377 billion this year.
This growth trend, the analyst firm said in its latest global IT spending forecast, will continue throughout 2013 when spending will increase again by 8.3 percent to $408 billion.
A forecast like this could bring some solace to vendors such as ADTRAN (Nasdaq: ADTN) (Nasdaq: APKT), which posted lower than expected Q2 financial results due to slower carrier spending.
From an overall perspective, Gartner said that worldwide IT spending will reach $3.6 trillion in 2012, up 3 percent from 2011 spending of $3.5 billion.
"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist—the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China—the outlook has at least stabilized," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. "There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending."
Vendors aren't the only ones that could benefit.
Service providers could also reap some benefits as more businesses start to adopt cloud services. Gartner predicts that enterprise spending on public cloud services will grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion.
"Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster," Gordon said.
For more:
- see the release
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