According to a recent Gartner forecast, global IT spending will reach £4.1 trillion in 2024, an increase of eight per cent from 2023.
The beancounters at Big G say the forecast indicates a rise from the previous quarter’s predicted 6.8 per cent growth, suggesting that worldwide IT spending is set to exceed the £8 trillion mark well before 2030.
Gartner VP analyst John-David Lovelock said that with spending on IT services on track to grow by 9.7 per cent to surpass £1.52 trillion, this category is on course to become the largest market that Gartner monitors.
“Companies must catch up with IT service firms to attract talent with essential IT skills. This leads to a greater need to invest in consulting expenditure over internal staff.
“We are at a pivotal year for this trend, with more funds allocated to consulting than internal staff for the first time.”
Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that IT services would become the largest segment of global IT spending for the first time, with leading markets including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), infrastructure software, and enterprise software.
IT services were expected to grow 8.7 per cent in 2024, reaching £1.5 trillion.
Expenditure on data centre systems is anticipated to surge, with growth rates leaping from four per cent in 2023 to 10 per cent in 2024.
“We are observing a cycle of story, plan, and execution concerning genie. In 2023, enterprises were narrating the story of genAI, and in 2024 we are witnessing most of them planning for eventual implementation in 2025,” Lovelock explained.
“Technology providers must be ahead of this cycle and are already in the execution phase. They are integrating GenAI capabilities into existing products and services and use cases identified by their enterprise clients.
Lovelock added, “There is also ‘gold rush’ level investment by service providers in markets supporting large-scale GenAI projects, such as servers and semiconductors. 2024 AI servers are projected to constitute nearly 60 per cent of hyperscalers’ total server expenditures.”
