After clamping down on tech spending over the past 12 months, CIOs and individual consumers are set to make 2021 a banner year for many IT budget categories. A new report from Gartner predicts that tech spending will hit $3.9 trillion this year, a 6.2% increase over 2020, with purchases of hardware such as mobile devices and personal computers leading the way along with investment in business software.
That forecast annual growth rate represents an even stronger rebound than after the 2008 financial crisis according to the research firm, whose reports are based on insights from thousands of vendors that it tracks and are widely followed by the tech industry. Last year, global IT spending fell by 3.2% as businesses and consumers tightened their belts in response to the pandemic.
John-David Lovelock, Gartner’s chief forecaster, thinks the ongoing health crisis is unlikely to derail CIOs’ investment plans this year. “Spending in 2021 [by companies] will not be about how well they expect the economy to do. It’s about painting themselves as the ones who will be there after this pandemic finishes.”
Working from anywhere
One of the areas poised for growth is tech spend to support remote work. This was one of the few bright spots last year, with investment in new hardware boosting sales of PCs to over 302 million units in 2020—a year-over-year increase of more than 13% and the steepest rise in a decade according to International Data Corporation, another research firm.
Gartner reckons investment in PCs and other hardware will rise 8% this year, hitting almost $715 billion. This growth rate will only be beaten by spending on business software, which is forecast to rise by 8.8%. Both sectors will be boosted by companies’ ongoing efforts to support work-from-anywhere strategies: According to the report, global IT investment related to remote work will hit almost $333 billion this year.
GARTNER
Automation software is also likely to get a big boost, with plenty of CIOs predicting they are likely to double the number of software “bots” they are using to increase productivity and reduce companies’ reliance on human workers. A growing percentage of this and other software will be delivered via the cloud, which should make 2021 another good year for cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The picture isn’t universally bright, however. Gartner’s Lovelock says spending in some industries such as restaurants, travel and entertainment that have been hit hardest by the pandemic is likely to recover far more slowly than in other sectors. And even if this year does meet the research firm’s bullish expectations, overall global IT spending is unlikely to get back to 2019 levels until 2022 at the earliest.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.