Gartner, the leading organisation for IT and business development, recently announced that Worldwide spending in the IT sector would increase by around 1.4% from 2016, reaching a level of around $3.5 trillion by the end of 2017. These new projections are a slight disappointment compared to previous growth rates of 2.7% predicted during the last quarterly forecast. However, the new projection takes into account the hit on the rising U.S. dollar.
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John-David Lovelock, Research VP, Gartner[/caption]
According to research vice president for Gartner, John-David Lovelock, the strength of the U.S. dollar has cut around $67 billion out of their forecast, and the expectation is that those currency headwinds will continue to weigh down earnings for U.S based multi-national vendors of IT equipment through 2017.
The Current Projections
If we were to include the $67 billion that has been cut out of the recent projections due to currency fluctuations, then the growth rate would be much closer to around 3.3%, suggesting that demand would continue to increase at a normal and healthy rate. The U.S. dollar traded as usual for less than €0.90 a year ago, but it's now at a rate closer to €0.94.
The segment for data centres is also projected to see growth, but only of around 0.3% after a decline of 0.1% during 2016, as the market for servers continues to drag the segment down. According to chief evangelist for Equinix, Peter Ferris, during a keynote address at Data Centre World, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each spend more in two years than the $17 billion spent by Equinix over eighteen years.
