Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technologies, along with unseasonably strong hardware sales in the first quarter, will give global IT spending a 5.3 percent bump for the year, according to recent forecasts released by Gartner.

The Stamford, Conn. research firm on Monday said worldwide IT spending will hit $3.4 trillion for 2010, a jump of 5.3 percent from 2009′s $3.2 trillion IT spending. And that growth will continue into 2011 when IT spending is expected to surpass $3.5 trillion, a 4.2 percent increase from this year.

“And while hardware spending is expected to rise 5.7 percent from 2009 to 2010, reaching $353 billion thanks to robust consumer spending on mobile PCs, hardware spending will stay below 2008 levels,” Gartner said. “Server spending will take a hit from virtualization, consolidation and the cloud, keeping hardware spending below 2008 levels through at least 2014.”

“Near-term spending on servers will be concentrated on lower-end servers; longer-term, server spending will be curtailed by virtualization, consolidation and, potentially, cloud computing,” said Gartner, adding that mobile PCs along with Windows 7 and mobile devices will contribute to the increase in hardware spending as server sales drop.

Software spending is also expected to rise, jumping 5.1 percent from 2009 to 2010 to reach $232 billion, Gartner said. The software market was not hit has hard as other IT segments by the recession, Gartner noted, adding that most enterprise software markets will also see positive growth this year.

And the infrastructure market is expected to boom as the software used to build, run and manage an enterprise grows. Gartner said the infrastructure market will be the fastest-growing segment through 2014 with virtualization, security, data integration/data quality and business intelligence representing the hottest software. Meanwhile, the applications market will also see strong growth.

“Cost optimization, and the shifts in spending form mega suites to the automation of processes will continue to benefit alternative software acquisition models as organizations will look for ways to shift spending from capital expenditures to operating expenditures,” said Joanne Correia, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “Because of this, vendors offering software as a service (SaaS), IT asset management, virtualization capabilities and that have a good open-source strategy will continue to benefit. We also see mobile-device support or applications, as well as cloud services driving new opportunities.”

IT services spending is also expected to grow in 2010, reaching $821 billion by Gartner forecasts, an increase of 5.7 percent compared to last year. The growth is helped by a jump in outsourcing revenue in late 2009.

Other areas of growth include telecom spending, which will increase 5.1 percent to $2 trillion in 2010 and network services spending which Gartner expects to grow 2 percent in revenue this year.

Source

This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.

Amazon S3 is a cheap and cost effective way to scale your site to easily handle large spikes in traffic (such as from Digg) without having to go through the expense of setting up the infrastructure for a content delivery network. Startup companies are embracing it for their online storage solution, and even bloggers are starting to use it to host their images and other static media (such as mp3 files for their podcasts).

Pricing is really cheap. There are no setup fees, no minimum costs, and you literally only pay for what you use, even if it’s just a couple cents a month. If you have a WordPress powered blog, and have a lot of media (such as images or mp3s), this plugin will help you easily utilize Amazon S3 for bandwidth and storage.

Once setup, this plugin transparently integrates with your WordPress blog. File uploads are automatically saved into your Amazon S3 bucket without any extra steps. Once saved, these files will be delivered by Amazon S3, instead of your web host. Any image thumbnails that get created are saved to Amazon S3 too. You’ll also find an “Amazon S3″ tab next to your regular “Upload” tab, which allows you to easily browse and manage files that were not upload via WordPress.

Thanks to Tan Tan Noodles Blog for this