Worldwide IT spending forecasts for 2013 have been lowered by $100bn to $3.7 trillion, after analyst house Gartner revised its figures for the year.

The firm said the revised figure was due to several factors in the market including a continued slump in device spending and fluctuating currencies. Despite this, the figure of $3.7 trillion is still up on the worldwide IT spend of $3.6 trillion in 2012.

The slow down on devices is seen in several areas, including traditional desktop computers and laptops, with sales of devices set to rise by just 2.8 percent in 2013 to just shy of $700bn. This contrasts with growth of 10.9 percent in 2012, when sales of devices hit $676bn.

Gartner analyst Richard Gordon told V3 this is due to a number of factors, such as a lack of must-have products this year, as well as the price of alternative products and consumer indecision.

“2012 was very strong for devices overall, but this was helped by the premium smartphone market,” he said. “Now, people are holding on to their smartphones longer; waiting for new products and operating system upgrades [such as iOS7] which essentially give them a new phone with the same hardware. In the tablet space new purchasers are going for low-end tablets because they’re pretty good and do the job.”

However, better growth is expected in the data centre market as cloud computing and big data push up spending, with $140bn now expected to be spent on servers this year. Gordon said this is down to an ever-growing appetite for data storage and bigger projects.

“The storage space has been relatively recession proof as the amount of data that needs to be stored is ever increasing,” he said. “There is a trend towards hyper-scale data centres; work can be more efficiently managed in those data centres. Although we’re seeing growth, it’s modest.”

There was also good news for the IT services sector: projected spending is almost at $1 trillion for 2014, as a result of many more complex systems being employed by businesses. In addition, the increase in spending on IT services represents a recovering economy, according to Gordon.

Telecoms still sees the highest spending overall, with $1.6 trillion to be spent on communications services this year. In 2012, the market shrunk slightly, but in 2013 the sector will grow again, which is in some part thanks to the rapid rise of mobile data.

“Fixed voice and mobile voice is declining and is shifting towards mobile data because of the popularity of mobile devices and mobile apps requiring a heavy amount of data use. In 2012 mobile data was about 23 percent of overall spending, by 2017, it will be 36 percent,” added Gordon.