A new study conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) indicates a massive increase in the amount that companies around the nation are spending on business technology. On April 8, the group announced the results of their newest report, the United States Technology Buyer Forecast by Vertical: 2012 to 2017, which appear to indicate that business technology spending will grow over the next five years with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.9 percent annually, growing to a total of around $330.7 billion by the year 2017.

The study examined 12 different buying segments of technology spending, and how behavior differed across 15 vertical industries, including accounting and billing services, customer service, engineering, human resources, sales, marketing and several others. In addition to the five-year forecast of technology spending by businesses, the study also found several short-term results. One of these findings is that by the end of 2014, business-funded technology is expected to make up 55 percent of all technology spending within the United States. Spending is estimated to surpass $275 billion by the year's end.

The study also found out which industries are spending more than others, identifying enterprise IT spending as the lowest spenders over the next five years, and marketing to lead the pack of spenders. Marketing departments alone are expected to spend almost $26 billion by the year 2017, with a 5-year CAGR at a staggering 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, enterprise IT departments are only growing at a 1.8 percent 5-year CAGR.

One reason that technology and business are starting to go hand-in-hand is due to a concept referred by the IDC as the 'four pillars,' which are represented by cloud, social, mobile and analytics technologies. More businesses are adopting these principles into their enterprise, which forces other businesses to invest in them as well in order to stay competitive. This cycle perpetuates and amplifies spending in business technology by corporations, which explains why it is growing at such a rapid pace.