Tablets and telecom to drive enterprise IT spending in 2011

IT spending will reach nearly $3.6 trillion this year, marking at 5.6% increase from $3.4 trillion in 2010, Gartner Inc. projects in its latest study. IT spending growth in telecom will be down however. Telecom is projected to slide from a 5.5% growth rate in 2010 to 4.9% growth in 2011. Still, with $2.1 trillion projected to be spent on telecom in 2011, telecom captures the lion’s share of IT spending overall, which comes in just under $3.6 trillion.
Tablet spending in the enterprise is expected to make a significant jump, reaching $29.4 billion in 2011, up from $9.6 billion last year. “Global spending on media tablets is forecast to increase at an annual average rate of 52 percent through 2015,” Gartner wrote in its report.
Indeed, tablets are one of the bright spots in an otherwise flat period for IT spending overall.
“The addition of media tablets, reinforced by an expected additional decline in the value of the dollar, accounts for the increase in top-line growth,” Richard Gordon, research VP at Gartner, said in a prepared statement. “Absent the addition of media tablets, the forecast would have slightly declined in constant-dollar terms; however, with their addition, there’s virtually no change in underlying forecast growth at the level of overall IT.”