Worldwide IT spending will hit a high of $3.76 trillion as it shifts from devices to new areas including cloud services.
Beancounters at Gartner think that despite Brexit uncertainty, trade wars, tariffs and Donald Trump IT spending is predicted to see three percent growth in 2019.
However, John-David Lovelock, research VP at Gartner, said the focus of this spending will shift dramatically.
“Spending is moving from saturated segments such as mobile phones, PCs and on-premise datacentre infrastructure to cloud services and IoT devices. IoT devices, in particular, are starting to pick up the slack from devices. Where the devices segment is saturated, IoT is not.”
Lovelock predicts continued strong growth for enterprise software spending, projecting it to total $466 billion in 2020.
This is being fuelled by expectations that organisations will increase their spending on enterprise application software this year as budgets shift to software-as-a-service, according to Gartner.
Lovelock said: “IT is no longer just a platform that enables organisations to run their business. It is becoming the engine that moves the business. As digital business and digital business ecosystems move forward, IT will be the thing that binds the business together.”
Despite the slowdown in the smartphone market, the research house predicts that the segment will grow 1.6 percent in 2019, driven by replacement cycles in China, the US and Western Europe.
“Skill requirements to keep up – such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, application programming interface and services platform design and data science – are changing faster than we’ve ever seen before”, he said.
