Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending to exceed $4 trillion in 2022

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5 per cent from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.

“Enterprises will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

“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.”

Enterprise software is expected to have the highest growth in 2022 at 11.5 per cent, driven by infrastructure software spending continuing to outpace application software spending. Global spending growth on devices reached a peak in 2021 (15.1 per cent) as remote work, telehealth and remote learning took hold, but Gartner expects 2022 will still show an uptick in enterprises that upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to thrive in a hybrid work setting.

“What changed in 2020 and 2021 was not really the technology itself, but people’s willingness and eagerness to adopt it and use it in different ways,” said Lovelock.

“In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”

Read: Gartner identifies four trends driving near-term AI innovation

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Gartner stated that worldwide smartphone sales to end users totaled 328.8m in the second quarter of 2021, up 10.8 per cent year over year. Despite supply restrictions caused by Covid-19 related production disruptions and component shortages, worldwide mobile phone sales increased by 10.2 per cent.

“Reinforced shelter-in-place instructions and factory shut-downs in India and Vietnam due to the second wave of Covid-19, along with closure of retail businesses and restrictions on online deliveries affected smartphone sales negatively in the second quarter after a strong start in beginning of 2021,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “However, regions with higher penetration of 5G connectivity saw strong demand for 5G smartphones and were growth drivers for leading smartphone vendors.”