
Posted by: Greg Elliott, Director of Business Development at 1102 GRAND
I ran across this article on CIOInsight.com on the prediction that hardware spending will reach $99 billion this year. At 1102 GRAND we are definitely seeing evidence of this spending on a daily basis. We are watching customers moving gear into newly built out collocation rooms within our building, as well as existing customers adding new or upgrading existing equipment. The growth appears to span many different verticals, but web hosting, managed IT service companies, healthcare IT and call centers are definitely the front-runners this year at 1102 GRAND.
Gartner: Data Center Hardware Spending to Hit $99B in 2011
Who says the future of IT is all in software? All software has to run on some sort of processor, physical or virtual, and all those have to run on something you can see and touch. And with the continuing deluge of data pouring into servers and storage arrays, there is no shortage of processors happening anytime soon.
Thus, IT hardware sales are going nowhere but up and to the right. Gartner has some new numbers that back up this trend.
The industry researcher is projecting that worldwide data center hardware spending will reach $98.9 billion by the end of calendar year 2011, up 12.7 percent from $87.8 billion in 2010, according to a report it published Oct. 13. Data center hardware spending is forecast to total $106.4 billion in 2012 and surpass $126.2 billion in 2015.
Data center hardware spending includes servers, storage and enterprise data center networking equipment.
Back to Pre-Downturn Levels
“Worldwide data center hardware spending will finally reach and surpass 2008 levels,” said Jon Hardcastle, research director at Gartner. “Growth in emerging regions particularly Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) is balanced by continued weakness relative to pre-downturn levels in Japan and Western Europe.”
Storage is the main driver for growth, Hardcastle said. “Although only a quarter of data center hardware spending is on storage, almost half of the growth in spending will be from the storage market,” he said.