Worldwide enterprise IT spending is set to reach $2.7 trillion in 2012, a 3.9% increase from 2011 spending of $2.6 trillion, IT research firm Gartner has predicted.
Gartner said that while enterprise IT spending growth is slowing (from the expected 5.9% increase in 2011), its analysts said that it is important to note that despite the global economic challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT.
Gartner senior vice-president Peter Sondergaard said, "The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT."
Sondergaard added. "IT is a primary driver of business growth. For example, this year 350 companies will each invest more than $1 billion in IT. They are doing this because IT impacts their business performance."
Sondergaard said two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a greater contribution to their industry in the next 10 years than any prior decades.
Sondergaard said, "IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships, fueled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and mobility."
The new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces. They include: the cloud, social, mobility, and an explosion in information.
The cloud combines the industrialisation of IT capabilities and the disruptive impact of new IT-led business models. However, the shift away from traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still in the very early stages, said Gartner.
"What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what cloud computing is doing to in-house data centers. It is allowing people to optimize around where they have differentiated capabilities," Sondergaard said.
The next stage of social computing is about mass-customer, mass-citizen, and mass-employee involvement with enterprise systems.
"With 1.2 billion people on social networks, 20 percent of the world’s population, social computing is in its next phase," Sondergaard said. "IT leaders must immediately incorporate social software capabilities throughout their enterprise systems."
The concept of one enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions is dead. Multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.
"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine," Sondergaard said. "Pursuing this strategically will create an unprecedented amount of information of enormous variety and complexity. This is leading to a change in data management strategies known as big data. This creates what we call a Pattern-Based Strategy architecture. An architecture that seeks signals, models them for their impact, and then adapt to the business process of the organization."
