India likely to spend $95.47 bln on ICT sector by 2014, says Gartner

India expects to spend about $95.47 billion on information and communication technology (ICT) in the country by 2014, driven primarily by hardware and telecom, according to research firm Gartner.

In a statement, Gartner said it estimates ICT spending in India to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent to touch $95.47 billion in 2014 from $56.82 billion in 2009.

IT spending in India saw somewhat of a slowdown as a result of the global economic recession through much of 2009. While many companies adopted a cautionary approach in 2009, a strong return to growth has been seen in 2010, said Peter Sondergaard, global head of research of Gartner .

He said this is due to a pent-up demand following budget slowdown in 2009 as well as the need to replace/add hardware and the massive consumer segment driven growth across many industries.

Gartner forecasts hardware to be the fastest growing segment with a CAGR of 20.4 percent through 2014 to touch $16.15 billion, driven by rising rural prosperity aided by growth in the small office and the small business segment in the PC segment.

The research firm forecasts the telecom segment, which will account for 73 percent of the Indian ICT market in 2010, to grow at a CAGR of 7.9 percent to $61.66 billion, while IT services are expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.1 percent by 2014 to $13.6 billion from $6.22 billion in 2009.

The IT services space in India will be driven by new projects in areas of business applications (customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence), virtualisation, data center consolidation and green IT exploration, said Gartner Head Research (India) Partha Iyengar.

Government and defense segments will create sizeable opportunities in large systems integration projects for application services, he said.

Indian software sector is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4 percent to $3.96 billion by 2014 from $2.11 billion in 2009, the report showed.

There are sizeable opportunities for software vendors within manufacturing, retail, transport and hospitality as well as the already established opportunities in government, telco, financial sectors and IT services, Gartner said.