Gartner: Global IT spending to hit $3.8 trillion in 2019

Gartner has predicted that worldwide IT spending will accelerate to $3.76 trillion in 2019, up 3.2% from 2018.

The analyst house thinks that uncertainty surrounding Brexit will only have a minor impact on IT spending and strong growth is still expected. However, the way this spending will be distributed across sub-sectors will shift as businesses change their priorities.

“Spending is moving from saturated segments such as mobile phones, PCs and on-premises data center infrastructure to cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices,” John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner said.

“IoT devices, in particular, are starting to pick up the slack from devices. Where the devices segment is saturated, IoT is not.”

He explained this shift is happening as IT becomes the central engine to make significant gains. It's no longer just something to facilitate business growth.

“As digital business and digital business ecosystems move forward, IT will be the thing that binds the business together,” Lovelock added.

This shift to the cloud will result in a significant uplift in spending, with Gartner predicting businesses will increase cloud spending by 8.5% in 2019 and a further 8.2% in 2020.

But a key point is that for this growth to happen, businesses need to address the primary concerns of the tech world, including a lack of skills in key areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, API and services platform design and data science.

“In addition to buying behavior changes, we are also seeing skills of internal staff beginning to lag as organizations adopt new technologies, such as IoT devices, to drive digital business,” Lovelock finished.

“Nearly half of the IT workforce is in urgent need of developing skills or competencies to support their digital business initiatives,” he finished.

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Industry: Information Technology News