Spending on IT to hit $3.6 trillion this year: Gartner

The revised estimate by Gartner projects that IT spending will be slightly more than previously expected, climbing three percent from the prior year's tally.

"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist -- the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China -- the outlook has at least stabilized," said Gartner research vice president Richard Gordon.

"There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending."

Investments in storing data or hosting computer services in the Internet "cloud" and in telecom equipment and services were bright spots in the growth outlook, according to Gartner.

Companies were on track to spend a combined total of nearly $1.7 trillion on telecom services and $377 billion on telecom equipment in what would represent increases of 1.4 percent and 10.8 percent, respectively, from the prior year.

Researchers expected spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion last year to $207 billion by the year 2016.

"Business process as a service still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service are growing faster," Gordon said.