Gartner says IT spending to top $4 trillion in 2022

With IT budgets growing at the fastest rate in 10 years, worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5% from 2021, according to the latest Gartner forecasts.

All IT spending segments—from data-center systems to communications services—are forecast to grow next year, according to Gartner. 

Enterprise software is likely to have the highest growth in 2022 at 11.5%, driven by infrastructure software spending. Global spending on devices grew over 15% as remote work, telehealth and remote learning took hold, and Gartner expects 2022 will continue that growth as enterprises upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to support the hybrid work setting. “Enterprises will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

Digital tech initiatives remain a top strategic business priority for companies as they continue to reinvent the future of work, focusing spending on making their infrastructure bulletproof and accommodating increasingly complex hybrid work for employees, Lovelock stated.

Globally, IT budgets are expected to grow at the fastest rate in over 10 years with an average growth of 3.6% in overall IT budget for 2022 reported among respondents to Gartner’s annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives which was released at its IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, this week. 

IT departments that adopt modular (what Gartner calls “composable”) architectures that integrate business resources and can be easily realigned depending on requirements will be the most successful organizations going forward, Gartner stated.

“What changed in 2020 and 2021 was not really the technology itself, but people’s willingness and eagerness to adopt it and use it in different ways,” Lovelock stated. “In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”

Most high-composability enterprises set up strategic planning and budgeting as a continuous way to adjust to change more easily, said Monika Sinha, research vice president at Gartner. “Without big deficits to remedy elsewhere, CIOs can afford to invest in composability, especially for IT developers and business architects who can design in a composable manner.”

According to Sinha, artificial intelligence and distributed cloud are the two main technologies that a majority of high-composability enterprises have already deployed or plan on deploying in 2022. These technologies are a catalyst for business composability because they enable modular technology capabilities, according Sinha.

Cyber and information security top the list of planned IT investments for 2022, with 66% of respondents to the Gartner survey expecting to increase investments in them. This is followed by business intelligence/data analytics (51%) and cloud platforms (48%), Sinha stated. 

“A high level of composability would help an enterprise recover faster and potentially even minimize the effects of a cybersecurity incident,” said Sinha.