Next budget year to see hike in Global IT spend

Following two years of turbulence in economy worldwide, next year will also witness a 39 percent hike in Global IT spend, predicts a survey by Gartner.

While Asia Pacific expects a slightly high budget increase at 44 percent, 72 percent among them plan for increases of more than 10 percent and 36 percent expect more than 20 percent increase over the current year?s budget.

The survey which was carried among 1,500 IT leaders in 40 countries had key initiatives like cloud computing, business process improvement, data centre expansion/consolidation, enterprise software implementation / upgrade, outsourcing, security, risk and compliance etc to understand general IT spending trends and spending. According to Derry Finkeldey, principal research analyst at Gartner, Asia Pacific is quickly in track of economic growth being the less hit regions of global recession.

Enterprise software implementations and upgrades are receiving the greatest investment focus in Asia Pacific, with 85 percent of organizations allocating budget to implementations in the current budget year, with most planning to spend at the same or higher levels in 2011. Though respondents in Asia Pacific are investing currently on expansion initiatives, 63 percent of them have not budgeted for any type of cloud service in 2010.

Finkeldey also pointed out how organizations prioritize initiatives especially cloud computing and data centre initiatives. "While we are seeing growing interest in cloud computing, most organizations are still learning when it comes to cloud services initiatives," said Finkeldey. The IT budget distribution across spending lines is fairly consistent globally, especially for telecommunications services and external IT services, with IT personnel accounting for about 30 per cent. External IT services account for 12.5 per cent of the average IT budget globally while Twenty-three per cent of IT budgets in Asia Pacific are allocated to enterprise software initiatives, with 35 per cent of budgets for new software licenses allocated to horizontal software, says Gartner.