Gartner: IT Spending to Top $2.5 Trillion in 2011

Good news, market research firm Gartner is forecasting global IT spending to top $2.5 trillion in the coming year, up roughly 3 percent over 2010. By 2014, spending on IT goods and services will rise to $2.8 trillion – well above the previous pre-recession high set in 2008.

So that’s the good news. But Gartner goes further to state that enterprises will shift their spending in new directions. According to a presentation given by Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard, businesses are redirecting their IT budgets on projects in four categories: cloud computing, social computing, context aware computing and pattern-based strategy.

The cloud computing trend is obvious. We all know businesses are adopting cloud-based services and resources to shift their spending from capital expenses to operational expenses, and to capture the benefits of scale, elasticity and reduced management burden.

The other three categories outlined by Sondergaard are more interesting and have significant impacts on how businesses will consume and individual users approach technology.

Social computing goes beyond the obvious social networking applications of Facebook and Twitter. It’s about the transformation of the culture, ethos and attitudes that will blur the divide between personal and professional activities. As Sondergaard says, “The rigid business processes which dominate enterprise organizational architectures today are well suited for routine, predictable business activities. But they are poorly suited to support people whose jobs require discovery, interpretation, negotiation and complex decision-making. Social computing, not Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but the technologies and principals behind them, will be implemented across and between all organizations. It will unleash yet to be realized productivity growth and contribute to economic growth.”

Context aware computing is what Sondergaard calls a melding of pervasive wireless technology and applications that leverage user location, language and feelings to create new services. This sounds like more intelligence marketing and business intelligence – and perhaps it is – but it’s more about creating holistic and nonlinear computer technologies. Sondergaard believes this will reshape the fabric of the Internet.

Pattern-based strategy “provides a framework to proactively seek patterns from traditional and non-traditional sources, model their impact, and adapt according to the needs of the pattern,” Sondergaard says. In other words, it’s the culling of data from social networks, point of sales, marketing, CRM and other applications that users interact with, identifying patterns and creating new, multi-dimensional sets of business intelligence.

If you subscribe to Sondergaard’s trends, IT spending increases won’t just bring new sales but also a whole new class of opportunities.