Global spending on IT is set to fall largely thanks to the strength of the greenback, according to the latest quarterly report from Gartner.
The US dollar has been rising against most major currencies, and with so much tech coming out of the States, the increasing prices will curtail investment plans among buyers, reported the analyst firm.
John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said: "We forecast US-dollar-valued worldwide IT spending in 2015 to shrink by 1.3 percent, down from 2.4 percent growth forecast in last quarter's update.
"However, this is not a crash, even if it looks like one. The recent rapid rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies has put a currency shock into the global IT market. Taking out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.1 percent, only off 0.6 percent from last quarter's update. Such are the illusions that large swings in the value of the dollar versus other currencies can create," continued Lovelock.
Overall global IT spend will fall to US$3.66 trillion in 2015 from US$3.7 trillion in 2014; however, Gartner expects Australia to escape the worst of the falls and see spending on technology products and services increase 4.2 percent to A$78.7 billion in 2015.
Among the categories of tech tracked by Gartner, software will be the strongest performer, set to increase almost 10 percent to A$8.7 billion.
Australia has been at the mercy of price increases by US tech vendors, with Cisco, HP and Apple all raising prices in recent months, and resellers telling CRN they expect more to come.
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