Analyst firm Gartner Inc. today issued a forecast that global information technology spending will jump 5.1% this year to a new record high of $4.5 trillion.

That growth will exceed pre-pandemic levels and, perhaps not surprisingly, Gartner sees a lot of it coming from the enterprise software market – which includes cloud software and services. In its report published today, the market watcher said worldwide enterprise software spending will surge 11%, to $750 billion this year.

The second-best-performing segment will be IT services, which includes managed services and consulting services. Gartner says spending there will rise 7.9%, to $1.3 trillion.

Gartner’s distinguished research vice-president John-David Lovelock proclaimed: “2022 is the year that the future returns for the CIO.”

Crucially, he said, CIOs are now in a position to move beyond the critical, short-term projects they have implemented over the past couple of years to deal with the pandemic, and are now free to focus on long-term investments. “Simultaneously, staff skills gaps, wage inflation and the war for talent will push CIOs to rely more on consultancies and managed service firms to pursue their digital strategies,” Lovelock added.

Through 2025, Gartner believes most companies will increase their reliance on external consultants amid greater urgency and an accelerated pace of change that widens the gap between their digital business ambitions and their internal capabilities.

“Gartner expects the vast majority of large organizations to use external consultants to develop their cloud strategy over the next few years,” Lovelock said.

Gartner revealed that within the enterprise software market, the cloud market overtook noncloud software in terms of revenue for the first time in 2020. Cloud is now accelerating rapidly, Gartner said, and will be double the size of the non-cloud market by 2025, it predicts.

It added that cloud will be responsible for almost all of the 11% spending growth it expects in the enterprise software segment this year. The reason is that organizations continue to focus on upgrading to a software-as-a-service model that allows more agility and flexibility, Gartner explained.

Image: Gartner