Recent research from analyst house Gartner has forecast a slight increase in global IT spend from 2011, with public cloud services and telecoms leading the way.

Telecoms continues to have the largest numbers in terms of IT spend, with nearly half of the overall spend ($1.7tn) accounted for in that sector, put down to net connections in emerging markets and multiple connected devices in more mature markets.

The cloud highlights of the research were:

• Overall IT spend is predicted to go up to $3.6tn this year, up 3% from $3.5tn in 2011
• The public enterprise cloud is expected to account for $109bn of global spend by the end of 2012, up $18bn from last year
• By 2016 the enterprise cloud spend will rise to $207bn

This increase, whilst not spectacular, is still good news in line with the bleak economic outlook.

Richard Gordon, Gartner research vice president …