This article originally appeared in the Sept. 2012 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY

A study released in June by Infonetics (News - Alert) Research discusses the likely potential for a significant increase in spending from telecom carriers ­– in every area except TDM voice – this year. More specifically, the firm expects worldwide capex to spike in 2012, then level out in 2015 and 2016 at around $345 billion.

This movement will be driven primarily by Clearwire, Sprint, and T-Mobile (News - Alert) USA in the U.S.; NTT DoCoMo and Softbank Mobile in Japan; and KT, LGU+, and SK telecom in South Korea, according to Infonetics. The firm also notes that China has created a $58 billion economic stimulus package for telecom infrastructure. And it says that telecom capex spending already is hot hot hot in Latin America, where capex on this front was up 25 percent in 2011.

"We're expecting a telecom capex hike in 2012 as operators around the world ramp their spending like crazy to launch LTE (News - Alert) networks, modernize their mobile networks, and carry out national wireline broadband initiatives,” says Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research (News - Alert). “Operators have to invest in their networks or they'll disappear – competition is too cut-throat not to."

Brian Farrar, founder and partner of strategic consulting firm Maven Wave Partners, says that the world of IT has “finally recorded several successive quarters of growth since the financial crisis of 2008 ended in the fourth quarter of 2010.”

He goes on to write that: “Dozens of analyses completed over the last few months, not to mention the latest fourth quarter 2011 update to the Maven Wave Partners study on corporate spending on hardware, software, and the IT workforce, confirm that we’re on a growth track.”

IT spending in the fourth quarter of 2011 maintained its strength (despite Maven Wave’s initial expectations that it would not), remaining essentially flat from the previous quarter, but outpacing the firm’s forecast by roughly 3.8 percent.

“The MIT rose to 142.7 in the fourth quarter of 2011, meeting our forecast for the end of 2012 exactly one full year early,” Farrar writes.

As a result, the firm has revised upward its forecast for 2012 from 142.6 to 154.7 – an increase of more than 8 percent.

“The revised positive projection syncs with our recent experience and conversations with clients, competitors and vendors in the market,” he says.

Speaking of the cloud, and to take this column full circle, last week I attended Cisco Live in San Diego. One of the terms I heard again and again was DCIM.

Research and Markets describes data center infrastructure management as “the integration of IT and facilities management to enable seamless monitoring of all systems across IT and facility infrastructures to improve the data center energy efficiency.”

Emerson (News - Alert) Network Power’s Steve Blakemore, who I met with at Cisco Live, explained that as data centers become more complex and flexible because of virtualization, it is becoming more of a challenge to manage what used to be a static environment.

That’s why Emerson and others like Mirapath and Opengear are offering solutions to help businesses that use data centers to understand and manage the capacity and energy requirements of their applications. Blakemore and others also noted that this kind of thing blurs the line between facilities operations managers and IT folks.

 “We’re seeing this melding of OT and IT,” Bob Waldie, chairman of Opengear, told me.

iTRACS Corp. says that “This kind of DCIM is going to be in demand moving forward, as it is specifically engineered to handle large, complex infrastructure environments.”

Gartner predicts DCIM will quickly become mainstream, growing from 1 percent penetration of data centers in 2010 to 60 percent in 2014.