IT spending to rise 8.6 per cent, with IaaS and enterprise software leading the way, report

Pandemic and continued digitalisation will see increased spending through 2022, says Gartner

Analyst firm Gartner, predicts that global IT spend will reach $4.2 trillion in 2021 from $3.9 trillion in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 8.6 per cent.

The two largest areas of spending are communications services ($1.4 trillion projected for 2021) and IT services ($1.2 trillion), with the latter expected to grow more rapidly, primarily due to investment in cloud infrastructure to support remote working and continued digital transformation.

"Technology spending is entering a new build budget phase," said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, in a press release.

"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 organisation in an already crowded market."

Gartner's projections are split across five categories, all of which are expected to expand in 2021 and into 2022.

The highest projected growth rate is in enterprise software, at 13.2 per cent in 2021 and 11.7 per cent in to $670 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, devices, which have seen a bumper 2021 thanks to the pandemic (13.9 per cent growth), are projected to see much lower - although still positive - demand in 2022 (0.2 per cent).

The IT services segment, which includes cloud, is projected to grow 9.8 per cent in 2021 and 8.5 per cent in 2022 primarily due to continued demand for IaaS. In 2020 the worldwide IaaS public cloud services market expanded by 40.7 per cent in 2020, according to Gartner, and while the analyst firm has not yet broken out projections for IaaS in 2021/2022, it is likely that this trajectory will continue.

Recent research by Computing Delta among UK IT leaders found that cloud IaaS/PaaS spending topped the shopping list, followed by end-user compute and then security software.