Gartner says worldwide IT spending forecast to grow 1.4 percent in 2017

This growth rate is down from the previous quarter's forecast of 2.7 percent, due in part to the rising U.S. dollar.

"The strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast," said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017."

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets.

For more than a decade, global IT and business executives have been using these highly anticipated quarterly reports to recognize market opportunities and challenges, and base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork.

The data center system segment is expected to grow 0.3 percent in 2017. While this is up from negative growth in 2016, the segment is experiencing a slowdown in the server market. "We are seeing a shift in who is buying servers and who they are buying them from," said Lovelock. "Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment."