Despite the potential impacts of the Omicron variant, economic recovery with high expectations for digital market prosperity will continue to boost technology investments. Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending to total US$4.5 trillion in 2022, up 5.1% from 2021.
John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, believes that 2022 is the year that the future returns for the CIO.
“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,” he continued.
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 $1.3 trillion, up 7.9% from 2021 (see Table 1). Business and technology consulting spending, specifically, is expected to grow 10% in 2022.
Table 1. Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
Through 2025, organizations will increase their reliance on external consultants, as the greater urgency and accelerated pace of change widens the gap between organizations’ digital business ambitions and their internal resources and capabilities.
Lovelock says this will be particularly poignant with cloud as it serves as a key element in achieving digital ambitions and supporting hybrid work.
“Gartner expects the vast majority of large organizations to use external consultants to develop their cloud strategy over the next few years.”
In 2020, within the enterprise application software market, the cloud market became larger than the non-cloud market for the first time, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic.
By 2025, Gartner 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.
