Gartner: Rise In Data Centre Spending Set To Slow

Data centre system spending is projected to reach $142 billion (£96bn) in 2015, an increase of 0.4 percent from 2014, says research firm Gartner.

But the growth is significantly lower than that of the previous year, where data centre system spending grew 1.7 percent.

Pricing pressure

“External controller-based storage, enterprise network equipment and servers have all been impacted by the depreciation of some local currencies against the US dollar, but the server segment has seen the biggest impact due to the greater pricing pressure that server vendors are exposed to, due to their relatively lower margins,” said the research firm.

The report comes as Gartner predicts that worldwide IT spending is will shrink to $3.66 trillion (£2.47tn) in 2015, a 1.3 percent decrease from 2014. Gartner pinned some of the blame on the rising dollar.

“We forecast US-dollar-valued worldwide IT spending in 2015 to shrink by 1.3 per cent, down from 2.4 per cent growth forecast in last quarter’s update,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner.

“However, this is not a crash, even if it looks like one. The recent rapid rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies has put a currency shock into the global IT market. Taking out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.1 per cent, only off 0.6 per cent from last quarter’s update. Such are the illusions that large swings in the value of the dollar versus other currencies can create.”

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