The rising value of the U.S. dollar along with modest declines in demand for IT and telecommunications services will slow the global pace of IT spending in 2015, a market watcher is forecasting.

Meanwhile, Gartner Inc. is forecasting a “tipping point” in the next three years as digital businesses shift from on-premise IT to hyperscale datacenters.

Gartner predicted this week that worldwide IT spending would grow to $3.8 trillion this year, a 2.5 percent increase over 2014. An earlier projection pegged the annual IT growth rate for this year at 3.9 percent. That forecast was revised downward as the dollar rises against the euro and other currencies. (The market watcher said plummeting oil prices would likely have had little impact on its quarterly projections.)

“The rising U.S. dollar is chiefly responsible for the change—in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 per cent,” explained John-David Lovelock, Gartner’s research vice president explained. “Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.7 percent, which compares with 3.8 percent in the previous quarter’s forecast.”

SOURCE: enterprisetech.com