Australian IT spending pegged to grow 4% in 2021

IT spending in Australia is on track to grow 4% to nearly $98 billion in 2021, Gartner predicts.

While the events of 2020 took a bite out of the market in 2020, with total spending falling 1%, the market is expected to bounce back to growth in 2021 as businesses bring forward spending on digitalisation.

Gartner expects that businesses will be forced to accelerate digital business transformation plans by at least five years to survive in a post-COVID world.

The strongest rebound in spending is expected to be in enterprise software, which is set to grow 7.8% this year to $19.57 billion, the research firm said.

But spending is expected to increase across the board, with spending on IT services forecast to grow 2.3% to $34.44 billion, device spending forecast to rise 4.4% to $14.78 billion, spending on data centre systems set to increase 5.5% to $3.15 billion and communications services spending growing 3.4% to $26.02 billion.

The forecast growth spurt is expected to largely continue through to 2022, with enterprise software spending predicted to grow 10.1% to $21.55 billion, IT services spending set to grow 4.5% to $36 billion and communications services spending set to rise 2.2% to $26.6 billion.

By contrast, device spending is predicted to fall 1.6% in 2022 to $14.53 billion and data centre systems spending is predicted to be largely flat, growing just 0.8% to $3.18 billion.

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