Forrester calls time on IT downturn

Forrester Research today upped its forecasts for spending on IT wares this year, thanks in large part to a slightly faster recovery in the United States than the market prognosticators expected when they did their initial projections back in January.

At the time, Forrester called an "unofficial" end to the technology downturn of 2008 and 2009, saying that global IT spending would rise by 8.1 per cent in 2010, surpassing $1.6 trillion when reckoned in US dollars. Because of the severity of the recession last year in the US and the faltering recovery as 2009 came to a close, Forrester only projected a 6.6 per cent rise in IT spending across hardware, software, and services this year, to $568bn.

But today in a blog posting, Andrew Bartels, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester who is responsible for economic and IT spending modeling, didn't just make an unofficial call on the end to the downturn, but he said more emphatically that the "tech recovery of 2010 is underway."

Specifically, Bartels said that communications companies in the States are buying a little more gear than expected and he raised his projections for US IT spending growth to 8.4 percent, to $578bn. (That extra $10bn is going to come in handy for a lot of hardware makers). The global IT spending picture is down a bit, however, with the dollar strengthening against the Euro due to the debt crisis in Greece. Bartels is now forecasting global IT sales will rise by only 7.7 per cent, to just under $1.6 trillion. A lot of that muted growth is due to currency effects, of course. But some of it is really the cooling on spending in Europe. ®