Companies will spend more than $3.8 trillion on IT in 2019'.

Worldwide, companies are expected to spend $3.8 trillion on information technology in 2019. An increase of 3.2 percent compared to last year. The investments are mainly made in the field of cloud services, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), according to a research report by Gartner.

The number of cloud-based software subscriptions also continues to grow, according to Gartner. The research and consultancy firm expects spending on business software to increase by 8.5 percent in 2019. This would amount to 431 billion dollars worldwide. Last year, the spending pattern was around 9.3%. According to John-David Lovelock, research vice president of Gartner, the focus is mainly on enterprise application software and software-as-a-service.

The report is based on the analysis of the sales of thousands of technical vendors in a range of IT products and services.

Changing role of IT

The forecast for the overall increase in IT spending comes as broader trends point to a possible economic downturn, amid uncertainties surrounding the Brexit, trade disputes and tariffs. A signal that the role of IT is changing: IT is becoming the engine that drives the business. It is no longer a platform on which companies run their business, observes Lovelock.

According to Lovelock, a number of dynamic changes are taking place that influence which segments will grow the most in the future. In his opinion, for example, a decrease in the purchase of mobile phones, PCs and other saturated segments will most probably be compensated by a revival of expenditure in, for example, IoT.

Decrease in investments in data centres

There will still be investment in data center systems, although Gartner estimates that growth will slow down to 4.2 percent. It still accounts for a turnover of more than 202 billion dollars, but a sharp decline compared to the 11.3 percent in 2018.

Last week a report by Forrester Research was also published. They also note that digital technology is playing an increasingly central role in the success of companies. This would apply to a large number of sectors. As a result, according to Forrester Research, the boundaries between IT and business decision-making are blurring.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.