Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.
“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, Research Vice President at Gartner.
“However, 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 going into 2022.”
Enterprise software is expected to have the highest growth in 2022 at 11.5% (see Table 1), driven by infrastructure software spending continuing to outpace application software spending. Global spending growth on devices reached a peak in 2021 (15.1%) as remote work, telehealth and remote learning took hold, but Gartner expects 2022 will still show an uptick in enterprises that upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to thrive in a hybrid work setting.
Table 1. Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
| 2020 Spending | 2020 Growth (%) | 2021 Spending | 2021 Growth (%) | 2022 Spending | 2022 Growth (%) | |
| Data Center Systems | 178,836 | 2.5 | 196,142 | 9.7 | 207,440 | 5.8 |
| Enterprise Software | 529,028 | 9.1 | 600,895 | 13.6 | 669,819 | 11.5 |
| Devices | 696,990 | -1.5 | 801,970 | 15.1 | 820,756 | 2.3 |
| IT Services | 1,071,281 | 1.7 | 1,191,347 | 11.2 | 1,293,857 | 8.6 |
| Communications Services | 1,396,334 | -1.5 | 1,451,284 | 3.9 | 1,482,324 | 2.1 |
| Overall IT | 3,872,470 | 0.9 | 4,241,638 | 9.5 | 4,474,197 | 5.5 |
Source: Gartner (October 2021)
“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,” said Lovelock. “In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”
