Gartner: Global IT spending to jump 8 percent in 2008

Gartner is projecting that worldwide IT spending till top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from a year ago. That's the good news. The bad: Much of that growth is based on the decline of the U.S. dollar, which helps American technology vendors.

If you factor out the decline of the dollar, which has fueled technology earnings, global IT spending will be up 4.5 percent in 2008. That tally still isn't that shabby. Gartner says emerging markets, obsolete systems and technology shifts are fueling gains.

Here's a look at Gartner's IT spending estimates and where the money is going:

Some takeaways:

• IT spending is dominated by telecom and IT services (70 percent of the total);
• Hardware spending is being driven by the PC upgrade cycle and has "no signs of a slowdown," according to Gartner.
• Telecom spending has a major impact on the overall total and accounts for $2 trillion of the IT spending tab.

There are wild-cards, however, when you project into the future. For instance, companies are in a software upgrade cycle that should go through the end of the decade, but that may not translate into spending growth as companies eye software as a service instead of replacing existing applications.