Data centre spending to reach $143bn in 2015
Mon 12 Jan 2015

Data centre spending is expected to rise to $143bn (approx. £95bn) in 2015, an increase of 1.8 per cent from last year, according to research conducted by Gartner.
The research group’s outlook on worldwide IT projected that spending in the industry is on pace to amount to $3.8tn this year, growing 2.4 per cent from 2014. However, this figure still sits 3.9 per cent lower than original forecasts.
Experts have attributed this slower growth to the reduced demand for certain devices, and IT and telecom services, as well as the rising U.S. dollar.
“The change in forecast is less dramatic than it might at first seem. The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change — in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 per cent,” said Gartner research vice president John-David Lovelock.
“Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.7 per cent, which compares with 3.8 per cent in the previous quarter’s forecast,” he explained.
In December of last year research firm Mordor Intelligence released a report also suggesting that data centres would experience healthy growth over the next five years. According to Mordor Intelligence, the worldwide data centre power market is forecast to grow from $15.07bn in 2014 to $24.01bn by the end of 2019 – driven particularly by data storage demand.
Gartner’s report also covers the enterprise software market, outlining a spending trend to total $335bn in 2015, a 5.5 percent increase from last year. It further predicts increased price erosion and consolidation of vendors over the coming year due to heated competition between cloud and on-premises software providers.
The research highlighted that in the customer relationship management (CRM) market, prices for services such as sales force automation (SFA) would fall by 25 per cent by 2018.