Spending on IT across the world is set to remain high next year as companies across the world look to get fully up to speed following the pandemic, new research has claimed.
Market analysts Gartner expect worldwide IT spending to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, as the post-pandemic recovery continues and working from home and hybrid work takes an even greater hold among businesses everywhere.
Companies are expected to spend increasing sums of money on virtually all subsets of IT, with enterprise software expecting to have the highest growth – increasing 11.5% year-on-year – with infrastructure software spending continuing to outpace that on application software.
Spending on IT services is expected to grow 8.6%, while data center systems spending will grow 5.8%.
Global spending growth on devices peaked in 2021 (15.1%), Gartner says, mostly due to increased demand from remote professionals, the rising popularity of telehealth, as well as remote learning. Still, Gartner analysts don’t expect a significant retrace in 2022. Next year, spending on devices will still show an uptick, as enterprises seek to upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to further facilitate remote and hybrid work.
Building software instead of buying software
Overall, spending levels will be lower next year, compared to 2021. To John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, the key reason for this is because businesses are more inclined towards building their own technologies and software, rather than buying and implementing them.
“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,” Lovelock concluded.
For the next year, CIOs should “reconfigure how work is done”, by embracing business composability and various technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows. The analyst firm describes business composability as “the mindset, technologies, and set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs”.
Business composability’s main principle is modularity to business assets, as that allows organizations to scale quickly and seamlessly.
