IT Spending to Reach $3.8 Trillion Next Year, as Billions of Things Get Connected

When you start adding up all the IT budgets of every company and government agency, you start talking about, as they say, real money. Here’s the figure: $3.8 trillion. That’s the new figure that research firm Gartner said global IT spending will reach in 2014.

And good news if you’re in the business of selling IT products and services: it amounts to a rise of nearly four percent from 2013. One big trend is the Internet of Things. The way Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s head of research sees it, there were about 2.5 billion devices connected to the Internet, and most were phones or PCs. By the year 2020 there will be 30 billion devices, each with its own IP address. By 2020, Gartner reckons companies and governments will derive about $1.9 trillion of total economic value from Internet of Things technology, in the industries of health care, retail and transportation.