Worldwide IT spending forecast to grow 2.4 percent in 2017: Gartner

NEW DELHI (INDIA): Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.5 trillion in 2017, a 2.4 percent increase from 2016, according to Gartner.

"This growth rate is up from the previous quarter's forecast of 1.4 percent, due to the U.S. dollar decline against many foreign currencies,"  it said.

"Digital business is having a profound effect on the way business is done and how it is supported," said John-David Lovelock, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

"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 fueled by business and technology platforms that will be the driver for new categories of spending. Industry-specific disruptive technologies include the Internet of Things (IoT) in manufacturing, blockchain in financial services (and other industries), and smart machines in retail. The focus is on how technology is disrupting and enabling business," added Lovelock.

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets. For more than a decade, global IT and business executives have been using these highly anticipated quarterly reports to recognize market opportunities and challenges, and base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork.

The worldwide enterprise software market is forecast to grow 7.6 percent in 2017, up from 5.3 percent 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.

"With the increased adoption of SaaS-based enterprise applications, there also comes an increase in acceptance of IT operations management (ITOM) tools that are also delivered from the cloud," said  Lovelock.

"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," he added.