Gartner: 2008 IT spending to surpass $ 3.4 Trillion; Cloud Computing to be a highly disruptive innovation!

So Gartner, the largest technology adviser to corporations, is saying the corporate shift to cloud computing is underway and destined to be a highly disruptive force in the industry. That struck me as intriguing, since a rapid advance of cloud computing into the corporate world is not a given, despite the consumer success of cloud-based services like Google, Facebook and others.

On Tuesday, I caught up with Mr. Tully, who is based in London, and asked him to elaborate on his cloud computing comments. “On one level,” he said, “this whole cloud thing is about shifting assets away from enterprises and to service providers.”

That, Mr. Tully added, should mean strong growth for corporate service providers. So far, there have been a few cloud-model corporate service suppliers, like Salesforce.com, and announced plans and investments by big corporate technology vendors like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and EMC. Internet giants like Google and Amazon.com are are offering some corporate services.

Table 1
Worldwide End-User Spending (Billions of Dollars)

	2007	2008	2009
Computing Hardware	382	408	423
Annual Growth (%)	10	7	4
Software	178	196	211
Annual Growth (%)	13	10	8
IT Services	748	819	872
Annual Growth (%)	10	10	7
Telecom	1,843	1,983	2,093
Annual Growth (%)	10	8	6
Total	3,151	3,406	3,600
Annual Growth (%)	11	8	6

Gartner (NYSE:IT)'s report is here and the Source to text above is here at NYT



Recommended reading: also read Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) report of the BRIC Bloc dream from 2003, a lot of stuff still holds true though.