BENGALURU: The Indian firms are expected to increase their IT spending to $81.9 billion a 6 per cent increase from $79.3 billion in 2020, research firm, Gartner said. The IT spending, however, reduced by 8.4% YoY with devices and data centre systems expenses witnessing steepest decline by 26% and 1.2%.
However, contrary to global markets, where IT spending reduced across all segments, in India, the firms continued to spend on enterprise software, IT services and communication services in 2020. These segments are expected to grow 7%, 3.7% and 4.9%, respectively, according to the report.
“The Covid-19 pandemic stalled many digital transformation projects for Indian enterprises, mainly because of the market uncertainties and reduced cash flows. Organizations that were digitally sound in a pre-pandemic world could contain the impact on their business. The pandemic situation was a wake-up call for many organizations to relook and revive their IT strategies and increase their spending on IT in 2021,” Arup Roy, research vice president at Gartner said.
The IT spending is projected to grow across all segments in 2021with enterprise software leading the pack at a 13.6% growth rate to $.7.4 billion. As the companies world over woke up to the significance of digitizing their businesses as a survival strategy during the pandemic, Gartner says that the sentiment will persist next year with spending on setting up data centre systems likely to touch$ 3.6 billion in the country.
The companies are likely to increase their spending on communications services by 4.8% to $28.2 billion and IT services to $ 15.8 billion (an 8% YoY growth). Despite the dominant work from home culture, companies are likely to increase their spending on devices by 3.8% to 26.7 billion.