A report from Forrester Research says that Apple will most likely be the main reason for any growth shown this year in the corporate hardware market.
In a broad report on global information technology spending that it plans to publish on Monday, Forrester Research estimates that government and business purchases of computers will grow a meager 1.7 percent, to $146.6 billion, in 2012 from the year before. Forrester includes tablet computers like the iPad in its forecast; sales of iPads to businesses are booming. Forrester estimates that business spending on iPads will rise 76 percent to nearly $10 billion this year.
That iPad growth, in addition to a 9 percent increase in business spending on Macs, should help offset what Forrester expects to be a dismal year for PCs and tablets that run Windows. The firm estimates that spending on Windows machines will decline 3% this year to only $124.1 billion. Sales of Linux and Android tablets will also rise, 52% to $5.9 billion.
There is the possibility the estimates of Apple’s sales to the corporate market could be off, as the company does not disclose figures for sales to the corporate market. The study partially relied on surveys of thousands of corporate IT managers to determine how much they were spending on Apple equipment.
The estimates do include company reimbursements for Macs and iPads that employees initially bought on their own. Apple has greatly benefited from “bring your own device” policies currently being adopted by many companies.
One of the assumptions in the study results is that the coming release of Windows 8 won’t be the jump start for the PC industry that many are hoping it will be. “I think it will have a positive impact, but it just won’t be a great positive impact,” said Andrew Bartels, the analyst at Forrester who wrote the report.
