IT Infrastructure Spending to Grow By 4%, $437 Billion- Report

In the wake of spending by service providers for resiliency in addition to increasing enterprise demand for cloud services, IT infrastructure spending is projected to grow by an estimated 4% to $437 billion.

The Global provider of market intelligence and advisory services for information technology, International Data Corporation (IDC) also projected that telecom spending is expected to decline by 0.8 percent in 2020 worldwide when compared to 0.5 per cent growth last year.

According to the company’s March 2020 finding, “Carriers will continue to invest in 5G network deployments in many countries, while the lock down has increased demand for fixed broadband services in the short term.

“The economic slowdown is expected to put ‘macro pressure’ on consumer spending, including upgrades to 5G mobile contracts, in the second half of 2020, yet the overall impact on telecom spending will be moderate compared to other ICT markets.

“Whereas, the ICT spending, which includes telecom and business services, will decline by 3.4% this year to just over $4 trillion with telecom spending down 0.8%,” the company explained.

The Program Vice President in IDC’s Customer Insights and Analysis group, Stephen Minton, said:  “Inevitably a major economic recession, in Q2 especially, will translate into some big short-term reductions in IT spending by those companies and industries that are directly impacted.

“Where there is growth, most of it is in the cloud,” he added.

The report said cloud spending will continue to post moderate growth as businesses continue to fund existing cloud deployments and some businesses may utilize the remainder of the year to accelerate cloud projects as a means to control costs and defer data center and application upgrades.

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Minton also explained: “Overall software spendin is now expected to decline as businesses delay new projects and application roll-outs, while there is a fundamental link between employment and spending on things like software licenses and campus networks.”

He added that the report found that early adopters of cloud and other digital technologies were best prepared to cope with the challenges and added that these adopters faced the least amount of disruption from an operational perspective.