Australia’s vendors may be predicting an increase in spend in the local data center space in the year to come, but Gartner’s look at the industry overall, on a global level, has led it to revise its original estimates, dropping its growth forecast by over a third.

Gartner original statement said it thought the IT market overall would grow by 4.1 percent in 2010, but the IT analyst reduced this to 2.9 percent this month.

It said utilities and the public sector would be the biggest spenders of IT. This was followed by media and services, healthcare, banking and securities.

Gartner said it thought overall spend on IT this year would now come in at $2.4 trillion and would hit 3.5 percent next year. It warned IT providers, however, to be prepared for anything as zero growth in 2011 was not off the cards.

“The bottom line is that technology providers need to be prepared for the worst case, where commercial IT markets stagnate and governments transition to fiscal austerity programmes,” Gartner told supplymanagement.com.