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Australian IT spending expected to reach nearly AU$94b in 2019: Gartner

The analyst firm is projecting global IT spending to hit $3.79 trillion this year.
Written by Campbell Kwan, Contributor
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Gartner's quarterly forecast update - April 2019

(Image: Gartner)

Gartner has published its quarterly IT spending forecast update, projecting Australia's IT spending to be almost AU$94 billion, up 3% from last year.

The analyst firm also projects Australian spending to increase to AU$105.7 billion by 2022.

In Gartner's projections, IT Services remains as Australia's biggest IT spending category from 2018-22, with spending for this category expected to increase by 4.4% to AU$34.4 billion in 2019.

Software is the fastest-growing category in the 2018-22 period, and is expected to grow to AU$1 billion in 2019, an increase of 10%, as more companies shift from "traditional (non-cloud) offerings to new, cloud-based alternatives". Gartner projects software spending in Australia to reach AU$21.2 billion by 2022.

Meanwhile, Australian spending on datacentre systems is expected to drop 2.7% year on year to AU$3 billion, Gartner said. The research firm attributes the projected decline to lower average selling prices (ASPs) in the server market. Growth in devices is also projected to drop 3.5% in 2019, amounting to AU$12 billion in spending for this category.

"In 2019, technology product managers will have to get more strategic with their portfolio mix by balancing products and services that will post growth in 2019 with those larger markets that will trend flat to down," said Gartner research vice president John David Lovelock.

For New Zealand, it is estimated that IT spending will reach NZ$13.7 billion in 2019, up 2.2% increased from last year, with the amount expected to reach around NZ$15.2 billion in 2022.

For global spending on technology products and services, Gartner projects it will go up 1.1% compared to the year prior, reaching almost $3.79 trillion for 2019. It also expects global IT spending to increase to $3.93 billion by 2020.

Gartner earlier this year released its 2019 CIO survey, which estimated that the number of enterprise players adopting artificial intelligence had grown by 270% in the past four years. In total, the research agency believed that roughly 37% of companies worldwide are now utilising AI in some form to boost their businesses and supply chains.   

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