Not to be outdone by Forrester, which recently released its own predictions for 2013 and beyond, research firm Gartner has published a research note that suggests worldwide IT spending will increase 4.2 percent to $3.7 trillion in 2013. While a portion of that growth is due to the relative strength of foreign currencies against the dollar, spending on “Big Data” apps and other information-management initiatives will also receive a good deal of investment through 2014 and beyond. At the same time, Gartner has lowered its previous forecasts for sales of hardware such as PCs, tablets, and mobile phones. "The tablet market has seen greater price competition from android devices as well as smaller, low-priced devices in emerging markets," Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote in a Jan. 3 statement attached to the data. "It is ultimately this shift toward relatively lower-priced tablets that lowers our average selling prices forecast for 2012 through 2016, which in turn is responsible for slowing device spending growth in general, and PC and tablet spending growth in particular." Gordon also suggested that increased confidence in the state of the global economy is translating into more spending. Security, storage management and customer relationship management are, in Gartner’s opinion, the current drivers of the worldwide enterprise software market (which it predicts will hit $296 billion in 2013). As more companies seize on information-management initiatives, however, that spending mix will shift more toward Big Data solutions. For its part, Forrester predicted that the global technology market will grow by 5.4 percent in 2013, before accelerating to 6.7 percent in 2014. The firm positioned analytics, Big Data, mobility, collaboration and cloud technologies as the drivers of a significant portion of that spending, especially in developed markets such as the United States. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenues will grow two or three times faster than “traditional” license-and-maintenance software.   Images: Peshkova/Shutterstock.com/Gartner