New Opportunities in IT Contracting as Worldwide IT Spending Grows

Techies working through umbrella companies are likely to see increased growth in the IT skills market during 2012, according to global technology research analysts Gartner, although not by as much as earlier forecast.

Last year Gartner had predicted a worldwide growth rate of 4.6% on IT spending, but that was before the global economic slowdown, the Eurozone crisis and the floods in Thailand, all of which have combined to depress the projection somewhat. Nevertheless, some growth in spending is still expected; Gartner estimates that it will be 3.6%, bringing the total worldwide spend to £2.45 trillion, a significant advance on last year’s figure of £2.38 trillion.

Thailand’s floods received less attention in the media than Japan’s tsunami and nuclear power station crisis, but they had a big impact on IT. The country is a major manufacturing hub for hard drives and other components, and the disaster destroyed many of its IT manufacturing facilities. Gartner’s Vice President of Research, Richard Gordon, believes that production may well drop by 25% over the coming two to three quarters as a result and may not return to full capacity until some way into 2013. Ruined factories will need to be rebuilt, an inevitably time-consuming process.

Even so, revenue from telecom equipment is likely to rise by 6.9%, with that from enterprise software following closely at 6.4%. Spending on all four major technology sectors (telecommunications equipment and services, IT services, enterprise software and computer hardware) is set to rise in 2012, a development that should generate new IT contracting opportunities throughout the year.

Source:

http://www.umbrellacompanies.org/2012/01/19/companies-set-to-increase-spending-on-it-in-2012/