Gartner Revises IT Spending Forecasts Upward For 2021 And 2022
November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With a market as large as the information technology racket, small changes rack up to tens of billions of dollars up or down in global spending. Any increase is generally seen as good news because so many of the individual IT budgets are gauged against the global average. So, in a sense, it just got a little bit easier for you to argue that your own IT department should be spending more dough on IT because the prognosticators at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending in 2022.
It’s not much of an increase, mind you. So don’t get too excited. In the August 2021 forecast, which we detailed here, global IT spending across hardware, software, and services was expected to grow by 5.2 percent to $4.43 trillion, and in the October 2021 forecast, Gartner now expects for the growth to be 5.5 percent in 2022 – and against a figure for spending in 2021 that it now estimates will be a much larger number than expected only a few months ago. Back in August, Gartner was expecting for global IT spending in 2021 to close up 8.6 percent to $4.206 trillion, and now, in the October forecast, Gartner thinks that IT is growing at a red-hot 9.5 percent to $4.242 trillion this year after an essentially flat 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.
Here is how spending by category now looks, according to Gartner:
Spending on devices will cool off now that many of us have bought new desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones as we worked from home, and it looks like spending on datacenter systems – servers, storage, and networking – will cool off next year after seeing huge growth this year as digital transformation efforts were accelerated at many companies and sheer capacity needs hit many companies in the financial services, transportation, retail, and wholesale sectors.
“What changed in 2020 and 2021 was not really the technology itself, but people’s willingness and eagerness to adopt it and use it in different ways,” explained David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, who puts together the IT spending forecasts. “In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”
We could not agree more about the first part of that statement. And as usual, we are not precisely sure what the hell Gartner is talking about in the second part of that statement.
All we know for sure is that more spending is a good thing.
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