Australian enterprise IT spending, excluding internal IT spend on salaries, will reach almost A$42 billion (US$31.5 billion) in 2006 - a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.3 percent from 2004 to 2009. Gartner says Australia can expect to see, as part of the predicted growth rate, A$15.6 billion spent on telecommunication services and equipment (a 2.3 percent increase over 2005), A$7.5 billion on hardware (a 1.7 percent increase), A$16.4 billion on IT services (a 4.6 percent increase) and A$2.2 billion on software (a 6.6 percent increase).

Wordwide enterprise IT spending, including hardware, software, telecommunications and services, will reach US$1768 billion in 2006 - a CAGR of 4.5 percent from 2004 through 2009. Not bad for a 'depressed' industry.

Gartner vice president and research director, Dion Wiggins, said that by 2010 open source software will account for 20 percent of the global software market, displacing more than US$100 billion in revenues from traditional software vendors. By 2015 enterprises will have to deal with 30 times more data than in 2005.