Published on the 09/07/2014 | Written by Newsdesk

The recent IT spending forecast for Australia and New Zealand shows, among other things, a growing desire for customer experience-related enterprise software…

Gartner’s revised quarterly IT spending forecast for 2014, released last week, showed a slowing down in global spending with projections readjusted from 3.2 percent growth to 2.1 percent. In Australia, total  IT spending are now forecast to reach $A76 billion, an increase of 2.3 percent over 2013 and New Zealand’s total IT spending is forecast to grow two percent to reach $NZ11.3 billion in 2014. iStart spoke to Gartner’s Sydney-based director of research Derry Finkeldey:

 The global market IT spend has been revised down. Were the A/NZ markets also revised down?

DF: For Australia, in Australian dollars, 2014 was revised downwards, but for the remainder of the forecast period it was actually revised upwards. The New Zealand market in NZ dollars was revised slightly up in every year. Both markets remain in positive growth for the next few years in local currency.

 Are there any markets that were not revised down?

DF: Yes. Quite a few. The US market has been revised down and this has a strong impact on the global market as it is still 30 percent of global IT spending. However, we have also seen softening in the China market (but it is still a growth market at six percent in USD), which is impacting several country markets in Asia Pacific as well. But Malaysia for example was revised upwards – it is growing strongly, expected to be up 11 percent over last year.

 The enterprise software market has had the biggest growth globally – is this also the case for the A/NZ markets?

DF: Yes, it is. Growth is robust for software across many categories, but particularly enterprise software. There is strong growth in software that both enables and allows understanding of the customer experience, such as customer experience management, CRM and BI and analytics. Infrastructure software is also growing. As organisations shift to virtualised models, and also seek to link between older systems and new capabilities, software becomes front and centre.

 IT services seems to be experiencing renewed growth globally following a plateau in 2013? Has A/NZ followed suit?

DF: Services will grow modestly in A/NZ in 2014. Some of what we are seeing now is the impact of the shift to cloud models – i.e. the shift from hardware to services, although this is still small.

 Was there anything else that stood out to you in the A/NZ numbers?

DF: In most respects, A/NZ is following wider global growth trends (or US trends) but New Zealand bucks the trend in 2014 in one area, as PCs/laptops are forecast to grow five percent in 2014, in an apparent replacement cycle.