In spite of recent warnings and negative commentary, Gartner is hiking its 2012 IT spending...

In spite of recent warnings and negative commentary, Gartner is hiking its 2012 IT spending growth forecast to 3% from a prior 2.5%. While still cautious on near-term spending, the firm claims there was little change in business and consumer sentiment in Q2, which leaves it slightly more optimistic. Spending on public cloud services (key players: AMZN, MSFT, RAX, CRM) is expected to grow 20% this year to $109B, and reach $207B in 2016.