IT spending projected to reach $4.5 trillion in 2022: Gartner | ZDNet

Gartner has released a new forecast for 2021 predicting the amount of money spent on IT will reach $4.5 trillion in 2022. 

If it comes to fruition, that would represent an increase of 5.5% compared to 2021. 

The report is broken down between data center systems, enterprise software, devices, IT services and communication services.

For 2022, Gartner is projecting that nearly $1.5 trillion will be spent on communication services and another $1.3 trillion will be spent on IT services. Devices will see $820 billion in spending while enterprise software and data center systems are expected to bring in $700 billion and $207 billion respectively.

Enterprise software saw the biggest increase in spending for 2022 compared to 2021 while device spending fell precipitously after a big 2021. The 11.5% growth predicted for 2022 is driven by “infrastructure software spending continuing to outpace application software spending,” according to 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, 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.”

Remote learning, telework and telehealth drove device spending to a peak in 2021, growing 15.1% compared to 2020, when spending fell 1.5%. 

Despite the numbers showing a focus on enterprise software, Gartner said it “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.”

Gartner is also predicting that spending on IT services will grow by more than $200 billion in 2022 compared to 2020. 

“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,” Lovelock said. 

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

Gartner compiled the forecast based on an analysis of sales figures from vendors across the IT industry.