back to article Hey Europe, your apathetic IT spending is ruining it for everyone

Listless IT spend in Europe is dragging down the pace of global recovery, according to the latest prediction from entrail-prodders Gartner. During 2018, IT expenditure on the continent is expected to increase 1.5 per cent to €667bn (£593bn). Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7tn (£2.7tn) in 2018, an increase of 4. …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Of course there's also pretty listless growth

    in Blacksmithing, and saddle-making.

    Am I the only person who knows you cannot have indefinite year on year growth without growing the planet too ?

    1. frank ly

      Re: Of course there's also pretty listless growth

      We need a shiny new thing to buy (or be bought for us). Self-driving AI controlled cars will save the economies of the world.

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: self Driving cars

        won't save the world economy. Well, if what I hear coming out of the USA is anything to go by.

        There are many forecasts that seem to say that we won't need as nearly as many cars in the future. Alongside Self Driving we will get car sharing. The soothsayers are stating that the average punter won't one a car in the future but be a member of a car sharing scheme.

        You will call up for a car to go from A-to-B and this self-driving thing will arrive. It might already have an occupant who also wants to go to B. When you get to B, everyone gets out and the car drives off to charge itself up and then wait for the next call to service. Yes, all cars will be electric.

        That's how it is predicted to work. Personally I have my doubts about the sharing thing but I have already gone Electric which seems to attract lots of hatred (aka downvotes) here. Hey-ho, that's life.

        1. Peter2 Silver badge

          Re: self Driving cars

          When you get to B, everyone gets out and the car drives off to charge itself up and then wait for the next call to service. Yes, all cars will be electric.

          That's how it is predicted to work.

          The batteries used are lithium batteries of precisely the same sort in laptops. As IT Professionals, we know that you get a thousand charge cycles out of a battery before it needs replacing which is why laptops are generally on a 3 year replacement cycle.

          So, the same battery depletion problems are going to affect the car. Since an electric motor and the frame of a car costs relatively little to make (at least judged by the cost of a replacement car body shell) then the major cost of an EV is going to be the batteries. And used once a day they will last 3 years at a charge cycle a day. If you put two charge cycles a day through it then it'll last 1.5 years, and 3 charge cycles a day will deplete the battery in a year or so. Roughly, assuming that you trickle charge the battery and that you go out at the weekends. If you don't and go away for holidays and don't take your EV then you might get 5 years out of a battery if your lucky. If you do things like fast charge your battery then like any lithium battery you'll get far fewer charge cycles out of it.

          This is going to be absurdly expensive in terms of replacing batteries. Tesla charge $40k to replace the battery in the roadster and even over a 5 year period that's considerably more than I pay for fuel before you even factor in paying for the electricity.

          And that before you consider the issues with increasing the grid generation capacity by 50% to charge all of the EV's, and replacing substations and wiring to be able to carry 3 phase power to every house and/or carpark in the country.

          To do it by the dates specified would require a staggering level of construction of power stations and infrastructure to be ongoing at the moment. It's not happenning. On the contrary we'll probably have less generation capacity in a decade as old power stations close. The planning required for EV's isin't happenning. It's barely even being discussed by people pointing out how absurd this is! Expecting EV's to be deployed on the schedule politicans are proposing requires either considerably more suspension of disbelif than watching a sci-fi film or an equal level of willful ignorance.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: self Driving cars

            Well, their may be somecthruth in what you say, but my vision is slightly different when you add self driving trains to the picture.Especially in a country like switzerland or japan, which is very densly covered by trains that can carry 1200+ passengers fast and over long distances, the cars would only be required for the last stretch between the station and the final destination. A lot less cars would then be needed indeed, and there is a lot of opportunity to design more intelligent trains which should be a lot easier that cars imo.

            1. Hans 1
              Boffin

              Re: self Driving cars

              We already have self driving trains, shit, we had them in 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9hicule_Automatique_L%C3%A9ger

              1983, Lille gets driverless trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lille_Metro

              I personally used the Toulouse version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse_Metro in 1993, still operating today ... am not sure it changes much in the equation.

              The Netherlands is also densely populated, they have high quality public transport everywhere, however, the roads are packed in the morning and evening ...a lot of people simply prefer driving, even if it is more expensive and takes longer to get to work/home.

              1. Peter2 Silver badge

                Re: self Driving cars

                "a lot of people simply prefer driving, even if it is more expensive and takes longer to get to work/home."

                If it really cost more and took then longer nobody would be driving. The only people that assume that are people with trains and busses every 2-5 minutes going where they want who assume that if it's fine for them it's fine for everybody, which is rather lazy thinking.

                Public transport only works as long as your going from one point on the system to another. The problem is that as soon as you create a good public transport system like londons zone 1/2 then the cost of the space inside it swells beyond the point that most businesses can afford. Therefore SME's build their operations in cheap business accomodation which is cheap precisely because it's not served by a superduper public transport system and the not rich part of the population end up buying homes they can afford, which are often way outside this area as well.

                People then need to get from a home not served by the public transport system to a workplace not served by the public transport system.

                Driving to work takes me 20 minutes door to door. Via public transport it takes an hour and a half, including walking several miles, often when it's cold and raining. It also costs about 20% more, and there are only busses once an hour so I have a choice of being much earlier or later than I want to be.

                Now, do you think I personally use the car or bus to get to work? Answers on a postcard.

  2. CheesyTheClown

    Downsizing

    My organization is moving away from large servers in favor of better code.

    I believe Europe is generally far ahead of the US on IT spending. We adopt sooner and we learn sooner.

    Let’s consider Cisco, VMware and Windows Server as a platform. This is because these are the prices I know best.

    To build a small corporate data center based on minimalistic best practices able to ensure one single server is operational an able to handle business at all times.

    We need two data centers each configured as follows :

    - 3 rack servers

    - 2 spine switches

    - 2 leaf switches

    - 2 data center bridging switches

    - VMware licenses (vCloud Foundation)

    - Windows Server enterprise licenses.

    Also, there needs to be at least two MPLS or dark fiber connections between data centers.

    This design is barebones. It contains no applications, SQL Storage, blob storage, NoSQL. This is just the absolute base configuration of Windows Server, Active Directory, file Server, etc...

    The cost of this in retail pricing (which will be about 40% less in reality) is about $1.6 million U.S.

    If you build anything smaller than this, you should be in the cloud using an IaaS platform which provides this for you.

    Let’s also add that if you buy said system, it’s not plug and play. You need a slew of It consultants to build, configure and run it. It’s a long term project. Consider that TCO is measured in the millions over the years.

    It’s far better to use smaller more classic platforms. In fact, I’ve spent a great deal of time evaluating IBM i for new projects. Eventually, I settled on using Raspberry Pi with Apache OpenWhisk. We’ll build all new systems using old-school CICS methodologies on OpenWhisk. We’ll start by adding proper C# support and building a role based access control system that meets our security needs.

    So, we’ll go from about €10 million a year for new projects to about €2 million a year since we’ll stop spending money on physical hardware like servers.

  3. Uberseehandel

    IOT spend is very cost effective

    In my experience, the returns on IOT spend are far better than on traditional IT kit. Fortunately, most of the time the IOT components are comparatively cheaper than the data centre or workstation kit that used to get the lion's share of the IT spend.

    This effect gets exaggerated because the IOT set-ups are usually quite efficient with their use of other IT resources. As we continue picking the low-hanging fruit of industrial automation, the difference in returns will begin to lessen.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gartner, the whores of the prediction world

    Gartner will sell the buyer whatever prediction they want to hear. When has Gartner ever actually had a prediction come true??? there is NO credibility

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gartner, the whores of the prediction world

      In a recent survey of 10 Gartner analysts, when asked to identify the difference between their ass's and their elbows, 9 said they were unable to tell any difference and would create a chart to match the customers expectation. The remaining analyst fell over and broke his elbow. Or his ass. He's not sure what it was...

  5. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Who needs 'em?

    > in 2017 the market began to pick up, increasing 3.8 per cent to $3.5bn. Meanwhile, spend in Europe increased 0.7 per cent to €658bn last year.

    Maybe Europe has enough computers?

    Since the RoW consists mostly of developing countries (and America) we would expect its I.T. growth to lag behind more technological advanced countries (and America). The more advanced countries will reach saturation soonest and then, hopefully, realise that enough is too much and not feel the need to keep buying more computers. While the RoW keeps improving its I.T. and therefore will keep growing its market.

  6. John Savard

    No Hope

    Of course, after Brexit, for the Continent to become less apathetic in its IT spending will not help the British economy...

  7. heyrick Silver badge

    "Obviously that would not happen if everybody believed it was all going to collapse after Brexit."

    Obviously? Not obvious at all. We're how many months along and still no idea what the hell is going to happen? So maybe the expenditure that is happening is because, you know, life goes on and stuff needs replacing/upgrading, etc.

  8. Korev Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Wonderful description

    "entrail-prodders Gartner" -->

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