Citing a “stabilized” outlook, research firm Gartner expects enterprises to spend 3 percent more on IT, a slight increase from the 2.5 percent growth it noted in a report published earlier this year. Gartner estimates that $3.6 trillion dollars will be spent on IT in 2012. Spending on IT is expected to grow 2.3 percent to $864 billion, and hardware spending is projected to increase 3.4% to 420 billion.

Telecommunications services continue to be the largest area for IT spending. Gartner expects for it to account for almost half of the IT dollars organizations spend in 2012, $1,686 billion, to be dedicated to telecommunications. That’s about 6 percent more than the 2011 budget. Much of the telecommunications spending is related to the increasing adoption of gaming, tablets and other consumer devices in emerging markets. According to Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner,

“While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilized. There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending.”

Public cloud services  are one of the fastest growing areas for IT investment. Gartner says that enterprises will shed out $109 billion for public cloud services this year, which is $91 billion more than last year. If the current trends continue, public cloud spending will reach $207 billion by 2016. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will continue to lag spending on infrastructure and software-as-a-service. Gartner predicts PaaS offerings will attract $1.2 billion in 2012, up from $0.9 billion a year ago.

The cloud is accelerating fast, and it has a lot of room for growth. Providers are only now starting to come up with ways to truly differentiate themselves, and SoftLayer provided a great early example of that with a few case studies it released last week. The infrastructure-as-a-service firm is not yet a house hold name, but according to a few customers it does a good job at filling some of the gaps that AWS and Azure are overlooking. Traditional IT companies like EMC, VMware and Dell are also investing heavily to expand their cloud offerings and win a share of the dollars that continue to flow into the cloud market.