Tech spending in 2009 will be down 5.2% on the previous year but Gartner is predicting a 3.3% bounce in 2010 to $3.3 trillion. However, the market is not expected to recover to 2008 levels before 2012.

Peter Sondergaard, global head of research, Gartner, says: "2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 per cent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 per cent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011."

This year, worldwide corporate IT spending is being hit particularly hard, down 6.9% year-on-year. The computer hardware market is also suffering, down 16.5% in 2009, to $317 billion. IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009 before recording growth of 4.5% in 2010. Similarly, software spending is expected to decline 2.1% this year before growing 4.8% in 2010.

Sondergaard says concepts such as cloud services will accelerate a shift from capital expenditure to operational spending in IT budgets in 2010. In addition, business intelligence, virtualisation and social media will all continue to be important areas for tech spending next year.

Finally, Sondergaard identifies three big themes that will emerge over the next year:

• Context-aware computing - tapping information about the user, such as location, presence and social attributes, to tailor their IT services.
• Operational technologies - devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity.
• Pattern-based strategies - building a framework to proactively seek, model, and adapt to indicators that form patterns in the marketplace, and to exploit them for competitive advantage.