Analyst expects businesses to rent more server power in the cloud, rather than buy and maintain their own
US analyst firm Gartner has released its latest IT spending forecast for 2017, which reveals that businesses are willing to invest more in cloud services as opposed to buying and maintaining their own data servers.
According to the report, growth in the data centre system market is up marginally from last year – 0.3% – but is still slowing down at a noticeable pace. The main reason for this is because businesses are choosing to spend more on cloud services instead, whereby they are effectively renting compute power rather than having to buy and maintain it themselves.
“Organisations are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data centre system segment.”
Overall, Gartner projects that worldwide IT spending will reach US$3.5 trillion in 2017, a 1.4% increase compared to last year.
In addition to cloud, other areas of growth include devices – particularly mobile phone sales. Upgrades to devices running Windows 10 are also expected to grow.
Gartner will provide more insight into its latest IT spending outlook in a webinar on 11 April at 4pm BST. Analysts will explain the emergence of new vendors in existing markets, the shifts resulting from new offerings like cloud, and the toppling of the largest vendors and the impact on IT spending.