India Inc is expected to spend about USD 95.47 billion on information and communication technology (ICT) in the country by 2014, driven primarily by hardware and telecom, research firm Gartner today said.

From a spending of USD 56.82 billion in 2009, it is estimated that the ICT spending in India will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 per to reach USD 95.47 billion in 2014, Gartner said in a statement.

"IT spending in India saw somewhat of a slowdown as a result of the global economic recession through much of 2009.

While many companies adopted a cautionary approach in 2009, a strong return to growth has been seen in 2010," Gartner Senior Vice-President and Global Head (Research) Peter Sondergaard said.

This is due to a pent-up demand following budget slowdown in 2009 as well as the need to replace/add hardware and the massive consumer segment driven growth across many industries, he added.

Hardware is forecast to be the fastest growing segment with a CAGR of 20.4 per cent through 2014 to reach USD 16.15 billion.

Increasing rural prosperity, aided by growth in the small office and the small business segment, is the key growth driver in the PC segment, it said.

Telecom as a segment, which is forecast to account for 73 per cent of the Indian ICT market in 2010, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.9 per cent to USD 61.66 billion, it said.

IT services are expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.1 per cent by 2014 to USD 13.6 billion from USD 6.22 billion (2009).

"The IT services space in India will be driven by new projects in areas of business applications (CRM, ERP, BI), virtualisation, data center consolidation and green IT exploration," Gartner Head Research (India) Partha Iyengar said.

Government and defense segments will create sizeable opportunities in large systems integration projects for application services, he added.

The software segment in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4 per cent to USD 3.96 billion by 2014 from USD 2.11 billion in 2009.

There are sizeable opportunities for software vendors within manufacturing, retail, transport and hospitality as well as the already established opportunities in government, telco, financial sectors and IT services, Gartner said.