A strong economic outlook compared to much of the rest of Western Europe will support relatively robust growth in UK IT spending over the medium term, with a CAGR of 3.1% forecast for 2015-2019. Market development will however be uneven, and we envisage a stagnant hardware market in the short term, while growth will be driven by areas such as the app economy, cloud computing and emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and Big Data analytics. The overall outlook is brighter than most of Western Europe, but there are significant challenges, for instance outsource spending is already squeezed by fiscal austerity measures, while we point to risks around the UK economic recovery in the context of global uncertainty and the reliance on UK housing as a growth engine. Meanwhile, the failure of high profile public IT projects in recent years has heightened public scepticism about further projects and resulted in much tighter scrutiny of spending.