Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 5.1% in 2022, Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total USD4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.1% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.  

Despite the potential impacts of the Omicron variant, economic recovery with high expectations for digital market prosperity will continue to boost technology investments.

“2022 is the year that the future returns for the CIO,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “They are now in a position to move beyond the critical, short-term projects over the past two years and focus on the long term. Simultaneously, staff skills gaps, wage inflation and the war for talent will push CIOs to rely more on consultancies and managed service firms to pursue their digital strategies.”

Gartner forecasts that the IT services segment – which includes consulting and managed services – is expected to have the second highest spending growth in 2022, reaching USD1.3 trillion, up 7.9% from 2021. Business and technology consulting spending, specifically, is expected to grow 10% in 2022.   

Through 2025, organizations will increase their reliance on external consultants, as the greater urgency and accelerated pace of change widen the gap between organizations’ digital business ambitions and their internal resources and capabilities, according to Gartner.

In 2020, within the enterprise application software market, the cloud market became larger than non-cloud market for the first time, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic. By 2025, study expects it to be double the size of the non-cloud market. Cloud is responsible for nearly all the 11% spending growth within the enterprise software segment in 2022 as organizations focus on upgrading their software stack to software-as-a-service (SaaS) to support continued flexibility and agility.