Businesses are expected to spend a total of $4.2 trillion on information technology (IT) this year, an increase of 8.6 percent on 2020, a new report from Gartner suggests.
The analyst firm claims organizations are still suffering revenue declines, but that many of them are increasing their IT spending ahead of revenue expectations. However, boards and the C-Suite are not ready to throw money at just about any technology out there; they are looking at specific technologies that can help them improve business outcomes.
To prove the point, Gartner claims the IT services segment is “among the top three highest growth areas for 2021”, mostly because infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spending has been on the rise.
IaaS is capable of supporting mission-critical workloads and cuts down on on-prem costs. Gartner expects this segment alone to hit $1.2 trillion this year, up 9.8 percent compared to 2020.
Enterprise software seems to have the highest growth potential, as Gartner expects it to grow 13.2 percent, compared to 2020. Next year, the analysts expect the segment’s growth to slow down slightly, to 11.7 percent.
“Technology spending is entering a new build budget phase,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished Research VP at Gartner.
“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.”