Gartner Anticipates Slight IT Spending Growth for 2019

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.79 trillion in 2019, an increase of 1.1 percent from 2018, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.

“Currency headwinds fueled by the strengthening U.S. dollar have caused us to revise our 2019 IT spending forecast down from the previous quarter,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “Through the remainder of 2019, the U.S. dollar is expected to trend stronger, while enduring tremendous volatility due to uncertain economic and political environments and trade wars.”

Gartner expects the data center systems segment to experience the largest decline in 2019 with a decrease of 2.8 percent. This is mainly due to expected lower average selling prices in the server market driven by adjustments in the pattern of expected component costs.

The shift of enterprise IT spending from traditional (noncloud) offerings to new, cloud-based alternatives is continuing to drive growth in the enterprise software market. In 2019, the market is forecast to reach $427 billion, up 7.1 percent from $399 billion in 2018. The largest cloud shift has so far occurred in application software. However, Gartner expects increased growth for the infrastructure software segment in the near-term, particularly in integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and application platform as a service (aPaaS).

“In 2019, technology product managers will have to get more strategic with their portfolio mix by balancing products and services that will post growth in 2019 with those larger markets that will trend flat to down,” said Lovelock. “Successful product managers in 2020 will have had a long-term view to the changes made in 2019.”

More detailed analysis on the outlook for the IT industry is available in the complimentary webinar “IT Spending Forecast, 1Q19 Update: AI — Use it, Build it or Sell it.” The most recent IT spending forecast research is available to Gartner clients in “Gartner Market Databook, 1Q19 Update.”

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The Gartner quarterly IT spending forecast delivers a research perspective on IT spending across the hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications segments with an eye towards greater understanding of market opportunities and challenges.