Gartner: IT Spending To Increase 9% This Year

Global spending on IT is expected to rapidly increase this year and hit $4.2 trillion, an increase of nearly 9% as organizations look for technology that can help them grow, according to a new report from Gartner.

Many organizations are still recovering from the pandemic, and many are willing to spend heavily on IT that has a clear tie to better business outcomes. That’s driving worldwide IT spending to increase to more than $4.2 trillion this year from the nearly $3.9 trillion in 2020.

That spending is also increasing ahead of revenues, reflecting a willingness of boards and CEOs to invest more in technology that can help their business.

That spending is expected to carry over into 2022, where Gartner is forecasting another 5.3% spending increase to $4.4 trillion.

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Driving much of this increase in spending is enterprise software, devices and IT services, primarily due to a boost in infrastructure-as-a-service spending that supports mission-critical workloads and avoids high on-premises costs, Gartner’s report says.

Devices will grow the fastest – at a 13.9% clip to reach $794 billion. Next is enterprise software, which will grow 13.2% to about $670 billion.

Meanwhile, IT services will grow at a 9.8% clip to about $1.2 trillion.

Data center systems will reach $200 billion for an increase of 7.4%, and communications services will grow 3.5% to reach nearly $1.4 trillion.

“Technology spending is entering a new build budget phase,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “CIOs are looking for partners who can think past the digital sprints of 2020 and be more intentional in their digital transformation efforts in 2021. This means building technologies and services that don’t yet exist, and further differentiating their organization in an already crowded market.”

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