Research house Gartner has projected that IT spending will exceed $1tr in 2018 in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
Research house Gartner has projected that IT spending will exceed $1tr in 2018 in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
The estimated spend is a 4.9% increase from last year's $974bn prediction, however all categories, including data centre systems, enterprise software, devices, IT services and communications services, underperformed in the EMEA. Gartner says that despite currency adding to the weakness, it will play as a strength in 2018.
John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said: "However, there is more to the recovery in 2018 than just currency effects. Strong demand in the enterprise software and IT services categories across EMEA hint at significant shifts in IT spending patterns.
"The forecast highlights that businesses are broadly reducing spending on owning IT hardware, and increasing spending on consuming IT as-a-service."
Gartner discovered that EMEA enterprise IT spending declined by 1.4%. "In 2017, we're seeing a pause in EMEA enterprise spending due to the switch to as-a-service offerings gaining momentum," commented Lovelock. "Among the spending rebounds in 2018, however, we expect lagging markets. The data centre, devices and communication services categories are all on pace to decline 3% or more in 2017. Despite improvements in 2018, spending on servers, storage, network equipment, printers, PCs, mobile devices - and even hardware support - won't recover to 2016 levels."
Additionally 2018 will see enterprise spending increase by 2.8% and whilst all categories will return to growth in 2018, IT services and software will increase the most. However, enterprise spending on devices and communication services will continue to lag behind and therefore will fail to recoup and 2017 losses.
Gartner's enterprise IT spending forecast looks at IT spending across 11 key industry verticals and across 21 spending categories. It does not include consumer spending on technology or services like the overall IT spending forecast.