Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.76tn in 2019, an increase of 3.2% on 2018, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.
“Despite uncertainty fueled by recession rumors, Brexit, and trade wars and tariffs, the likely scenario for IT spending in 2019 is growth,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “However, there are a lot of dynamic changes happening in regards to which segments will be driving growth in the future. Spending is moving from saturated segments such as mobile phones, PCs and on-premises data centre infrastructure to cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. IoT devices, in particular, are starting to pick up the slack from devices. Where the devices segment is saturated, IoT is not.”
With the shift to cloud, a key driver of IT spending, enterprise software will continue to exhibit strong growth, with worldwide software spending projected to grow 8.5% in 2019. It will grow another 8.2% in 2020 to total $466bn. Organisations are expected to increase spending on enterprise application software in 2019, with more of the budget shifting to software as a service (SaaS).
“In addition to buying behavior changes, we are also seeing skills of internal staff beginning to lag as organizations adopt new technologies, such as IoT devices, to drive digital business,” it says. “Nearly half of the IT workforce is in urgent need of developing skills or competencies to support their digital business initiatives. Skill requirements to keep up, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, API and services platform design and data science, are changing faster than we’ve ever seen before.”
For more insights, Gartner's research director Mark Paine will be talking more about the changes in customer buying at the Managed Services Summit Europe in Amsterdam on May 23rd. In a presentation: “Working with customers and their chaotic buying processes” he will give a researcher's view on how the changed customer buying process has become hard to monitor, hard to follow and can be abruptly fore-shortened."
More details: http://www.mshsummit.com/amsterdam/
