IT Spending to Reach 3.7 Triiilllion Dollars by 2013, Gartner Predicts

Worldwide spending on information technology will break through the $3.7 trillion level in 2013, propelled in large part by an increase in spending on big-data technology and on cloud computing, according to the latest prediction by the research firm Gartner.

Gartner made its latest prediction at its annual Symposium and ITxpo in Orlando today. If that number feels a little familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was just this April when Gartner said IT spending in 2012 would be exactly that same figure: $3.7 trillion. Turns out it was $3.6 trillion. So what’s a $100 billion between friends?

Anyway. Here’s another prediction: By 2015, there will be 4.4 million jobs worldwide devoted to the support of big data, of which 1.9 million will materialize in the U.S., says Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s global head of research. Even better, he predicts that each job created by big data will generate three more outside of IT, working out to a grand total of about six million jobs.

There is, however, a big wrinkle: There will probably be a shortage of trained people to take those jobs, meaning only about one-third of them will ever get filled. Crazy, right? Gartner’s not the first to notice this trend: A study by McKinsey found that the demand for people with the deep analytical skills required to make use of information created by big-data work will come up short by a six-figure sum by 2018, prompting some start-ups like Trifacta to seek ways to automate that process in software.