Abolition of roaming charges in the European Union and parts of North America will negatively impact the spending in the telecom services segment. While the removal of roaming will increase mobile voice and data traffic, the decision will not be enough to counter the corresponding loss of revenue from lost roaming charges.

The size of the devices market including PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones, tablets and printers is forecast to decline 1.9 percent in 2016.

The combination of economic conditions preventing countries such as Russia, Japan and Brazil from returning to stronger growth, together with a shift in phone spending in emerging markets to lower-cost phones, is overlaid with weak tablet adoption in regions where there was an expectation of growth.

Ultramobile premium devices are expected to drive the PC market with the move to Windows 10 and Intel Skylake-based PCs.

Data center systems’ spending will grow 3 percent to $75 billion in 2016. The server market has seen stronger-than-expected demand from the hyperscale sector, which has lasted longer than expected.

Enterprise software spending will grow 5.3 percent to $326 billion.

Spending in the IT services market is expected to increase 3.1 percent to $940 billion in 2016, following a decline of 4.5 percent in 2015. This is due to accelerating momentum in cloud infrastructure adoption and buyer acceptance of the cloud model, said Gartner.

The total IT spending is forecast to total $3.54 trillion dollars in 2016, a 0.6 percent increase over 2015 spending of $3.52 trillion. $216 billion dollars less was spent on IT in 2015 than in 2014 and 2014 spending levels won’t be surpassed until 2019.

Telecomlead.com