Gartner Predicts Rebound in Global IT Spending Next Year, Forecasts 4% Growth

November 20, 2020

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | B2B | Customer-Centric | Industries | Technology

Gartner Global IT Spending Forecast Nov2020Communications Services make up the largest share (36.9%) of forecast global IT spending for 2020, though along with all other segments it is expected to see a decline in spending year-over-year. So finds new data from Gartner, painting a picture of the outlook for the IT market heading into 2021.

Based on analysis of the sales of thousands of vendors in IT products and services, these latest figures project an overall IT spend of $3.6 trillion dollars in 2020. This would represent a 5.4% decrease from 2019’s total, and includes a decline in spending in all IT segments. Devices spending appears to have been hit particularly hard in 2020, expected to see the largest decline in growth of all IT segments (-13.4%), while Communications Services should end the year having fared better with a 2.9% decline.

Beyond Communications Services, with its 36.9% share of total forecast IT spend this year lies IT Services (27.5% share), followed by Devices (17.1%), Enterprise Software (12.7%) and Data Center Systems (5.8%).

Gartner’s forecast anticipates a quick rebound next year with all IT segments looking at growth in spend in 2021. In particular, Enterprise Software spending is set to bounce back strongly with the highest growth of all segments (+7.2%), which Gartner attributes to organizations necessarily making developments to support their workforce in working from home since the pandemic, or educational institutions introducing distance learning.

The projection also puts Enterprise Software spending back on the path set out by stand-out growth in the segment in 2019, when it increased 11.7%, compared to the overall average growth then of 2.4%.

The rebound in spending for Data Center Systems, the segment expected to see the second-highest growth rate in 2021 (+5.2%), is  attributed to global data center build-out accelerating among “hyperscalers”, as well as ongoing data center expansion plans at regular organizations.

Despite the ongoing economic uncertainty since the COVID-19 pandemic, such growth projections are only the latest to suggest that investment will not be hindered for long by the crisis. Indeed, previous research from the CMO Spend Survey found that the majority of CMOs expect their martech budgets to increase in 2021.

Read the data in full here.

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