Australian IT spending to reach $84.8bn in 2018

Total spending on IT projects and services in Australia will grow 2.6% in 2018 to $84.8 billion, but this will be well below the global average growth of 4.3%, Gartner has projected.

Enterprise software will be the fastest growing segment of the market, with total spending forecast to grow 11.7% to $12.69 billion, the company said.

IT services will remain the largest total segment with total projected spending of $30.42 billion, but will grow at a more modest 1.8%. Data centre systems revenue is expected to increase by 3.3% to $2.71 billion, returning to growth after a 1.9% decline this year.

Communications services spending is meanwhile predicted to grow at an anaemic 0.6% to $26.77 billion, while device spending is expected to shrink slightly to $12.16 billion.

While spending growth in Australia will be significantly below the expected 4.3% global increase in IT spending in 2018, the local market’s rate of growth is consistent with most western economies, according to Gartner VP Matthew Boon.

“What is happening is a shift in the type of spending, towards off-premise technologies such as cloud (SaaS and infrastructure), analytics and security, and away from traditional IT, for example,” he said.

“With Microsoft launching Azure data centres in Canberra and Salesforce now live on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure in Australia, more barriers to using cloud applications are being broken down, especially for the public sector.”

In New Zealand IT spending is projected to grow 2.5% to NZ$12 billion ($10.79 billion), with enterprise software revenue up 9.7% and all other categories growing between 1.1% and 1.8%.

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