Global IT spending to hit $4.5tn next year - Gartner

Gartner forecasts an increase of 5.5 per cent compared with 2021

Worldwide IT spending is projected to reach $4.5tn in 2022, according to the latest forecast from researcher Gartner.

It would mark an increase of 5.5 per cent from spending in 2021, with enterprise software expected to have the highest growth at 11.5 per cent as infrastructure software spending continues to outpace application software spending.

Spending on IT services and data centre systems is also expected to grow at a rate of 8.6 per cent and 5.8 per cent respectively, while device spending is expected to shoot up by 2.3 per cent after seeing a 15.1 per cent year-on-year rise in 2021 as enterprises look to upgrade devices and invest in multiple devices to "thrive in a hybrid work setting".

"Organisations will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021," said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

"However, digital tech initiatives remain a top strategic business priority for companies as they continue to reinvent the future of work, focusing spending on making their infrastructure bulletproof and accommodating increasingly complex hybrid work for employees going into 2022.

"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. In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows."