IT market research agency IDC has revealed that financial and professional services firms, retailers, and healthcare providers will be driving IT spending growth in 2017.
Professional services firms, including cloud service providers, will increase their IT spending by 6 percent in 2017.
Financial services sector will increase their IT budgets by more than 5 percent.
IT spending will reach $2.7 trillion by 2021, with the largest contributions coming from consumers, banks, manufacturers, and telecommunications providers.
IDC said overall consumer spending will slow throughout the forecast period.
Consumer smartphone spending will increase 7 percent this year. Consumer notebook sales will achieve 2 percent growth. Consumer tablet sales will decline in the short term.
Commercial tablet sales will achieve positive growth across enterprise and public sector segments. Healthcare, services, telecommunications, manufacturing, and utilities will be spending on commercial tablets.
Commercial spending on traditional PCs is expected to be weaker, but will be positive outside of the consumer and government sectors. The education industry will post the strongest growth in traditional PCs, driven by 13 percent increase in sales of notebooks to education customers.
Sales of desktop PCs will decline across most industries.
Cloud service providers are expected to resume datacenter investment growth in the second half of 2017.
Cloud service providers’ datacenter investment will drive server and storage spending by professional services firms to almost 9 percent growth.
Enterprise buyers are poised for a server upgrade cycle this year, driving positive growth in spending across vertical industries.
Enterprise software spending will be led by professional services (+9 percent), followed by banking, securities and investment services, retail, and healthcare (all +8 percent).
Software spending will surpass $600 billion by 2021, with the largest contributions from manufacturing, banking, and professional services.
The strongest IT services spending growth will be in banking, telecommunications, and professional services, which will each post increases of around 4 percent.
Growth will be stronger in business services (business process outsourcing (BPO) and business consulting), led by healthcare (+8 percent), banking (+7.5 percent) and retail (+7 percent).
IDC said total IT and business services spending will be more than $1 trillion next year, with the largest contributions from banking, discrete manufacturing, and federal/central government.
Governments in a number of emerging economies are investing heavily in smart city and digital transformation projects, and this will drive a sustained period of government IT budget increases in key technologies.
