Worldwide IT expenditure set to increase by 4.5% in 2017

Yesterday Memeburn reported positive news for the South African IT space, an industry predicted to experience solid growth in 2017.

Today research firm IDC has published its findings on global IT expenditure.

This year’s worldwide IT spend is set to increase to US$2.1-trillion, an increase of 4.5% over 2016. This after 2016 experienced a year-on-year growth spurt of 2.5%.

IDC suggests that infrastructure hardware, mobile hardware and enterprise software are leading the gains.

Expenditure on data centres and server hardware is set to balloon by 4% in 2017, while Infrastructure-as-a-Service spending is set to exceed US$25-billion. This increase, IDC claims, is due to cloud services’ recent boom and product refresh cycles.

Software spend is set to lead the IT expenditure charge in South Africa in 2017, and this rings true worldwide. An increase of 7% is expected, with spend totalling US$471-billion. This growth is driven by Software-as-a-Service, big data and analytics.

China is now responsible for a quarter of all spend on mobile devices, while the US remains the world’s overall biggest spender

Spending on mobile devices is also set to increase after 2016’s modest growth.

“Last year saw a significant slowdown in the smartphone market, as increasing maturity and price competition affected many markets,” explains IDC in a press release.

Smartphone spending in particular is set to jump by 7% this year to US$439-billion, with the outlook buoyed by latter-year device launches and positive penetration rates in emerging markets.

South Africa’s IT spend to total R266bn in 2017

According to a report by research giant Gartner, South Africa’s total IT spend is set to hit R266.1-billion by year-end — a 2.4% increase over 2016. Read more…

Speaking of markets, IDC notes that the likes of Brazil, Turkey and Nigeria show improvements over 2016, but China now stands out as the largest single-market for expenditure on devices, responsible for a quarter of IT spend from mobile devices, PCs and peripherals.

The United States remains the biggest market overall, while India’s IT spend is set to grow around 10% in 2017 dwarfed only by the Asia-Pacific with an 8% increase forecast.

As for 2018, IDC forecasts that global IT spend should grow once again, suggesting a 4% increase.