“Industry-specific disruptive technologies” to contribute to increase in worldwide IT spending: Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total US$3.5 trillion, a 2.4% increase from last year, driven in part by “industry-specific disruptive technologies,” Gartner Inc. reported on Thursday.

“Digital business is having a profound effect on the way business is done and how it is supported,” John-David Lovelock, vice president and distinguished analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, said in a statement. “The impact of digital business is giving rise to new categories; for example, the convergence of ‘software plus services plus intellectual property.’ These next-generation offerings are fuelled by business and technology platforms that will be the driver for new categories of spending.”

Industry-specific disruptive technologies include the Internet of Things in manufacturing, blockchain in financial services (and other industries) and smart machines in retail, the research and advisory company said in the statement. “The focus is on how technology is disrupting and enabling business.”

The projected growth rate of 2.4% is up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 1.4%, due to the U.S. dollar decline against many foreign currencies, Gartner reported.

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast said that, in particular, the worldwide enterprise software market is forecast to grow 7.6% in 2017, up from 5.3% growth in 2016. “As software applications allow more organizations to derive revenue from digital business channels, there will be a stronger need to automate and release new applications and functionality,” Gartner suggested.

As well, with the increased adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based enterprise applications (a pay-as-you-go software solution purchased from a cloud service provider), “there also comes an increase in acceptance of IT operations management (ITOM) tools that are also delivered from the cloud,” Lovelock said in the statement. These cloud-based tools allow infrastructure and operations (I&O) organizations to more rapidly add functionality and adopt newer technologies to help them manage faster application release cycles. “If the I&O team does not monitor and track the rapidly changing environment, it risks infrastructure and application service degradation, which ultimately impacts the end-user experience and can have financial as well as brand repercussions,” Gartner said.

The forecast also said that worldwide spending on devices – PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones – is projected to grow 3.8% in 2017, to reach US$654 billion, up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 1.7%.