Analyst house Gartner has forecast global IT spending will hit a total of $4 trillion in 2022, marking an increase of 5.5% over this year.
Gartner analysts discussed the outlook for the global IT market during the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas event, which took place between 18-21st October.
In an accompanying release, the firm said that businesses will continue to focus on digital tech initiatives and adapt to a new hybrid way of working, driving further spend.
“Organisations will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021,” commented John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner.
“However, digital tech initiatives remain a top strategic business priority for companies as they continue to reinvent the future of work, focusing spending on making their infrastructure bulletproof and accommodating increasingly complex hybrid work for employees going into 2022.”
The Enterprise Software segment is expected to have the highest growth next year, at 11.5%, driven by infrastructure software spending continuing to outpace application software spending.
Global spending on devices reached a peak in 2021 (15.1%) as remote work, telehealth, and remote learning took hold – but analysts said they expect 2022 will still show an uptick of around 2.3% as enterprises further upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices for hybrid working.
Elsewhere, Gartner predicts Data Centre Systems will grow by 5.8%, IT Services by 8.6%, as well as Communications Services by 2.1%.
“What changed in 2020 and 2021 was not really the technology itself, but people’s willingness and eagerness to adopt it and use it in different ways,” explained Lovelock.
“In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”
Gartner’s look into EMEA-specific IT spending is set to be released on 10th November, which will be unveiled at the accompanying Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 EMEA Summit.
