Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.7 trillion in 2023, an increase of 4.3% from 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. As CIOs continue to lose the competition for IT talent, they are shifting spending to technologies that enable automation and efficiency to drive growth at scale with fewer employees.
“Digital business transformations are beginning to morph,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “IT projects are shifting from a focus on external facing deliverables such as revenue and customer experience, to more inward facing efforts focused on optimization.”
The software segment will see double-digit growth in 2023 as organizations increase utilization and reallocate spending to core applications and platforms that support efficiency gains, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Vendor price increases will also continue to bolster software spending through this year.
While the overall outlook for enterprise IT spending is positive, devices spending will decline 8.6% in 2023 due to the ongoing impact of inflation on consumer purchasing power.