John-David Lovelock, vice president for research at Gartner, said, “2022 is the year that the future returns for the chief information officer (CIO). They are now in a position to move beyond the critical, short-term projects over the past two years and focus on the long term. Simultaneously, staff skill 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.”
Gartner expects the vast majority of large organisations to use external consultants to develop their cloud strategy over the next few years, Lovelock said.
Gartner forecasts that the IT services segment – which includes consulting and managed services – to have the second highest spending growth in 2022, reaching $1.3 trillion, up 7.9% from 2021. Business and technology consulting spending, specifically, is expected to grow 10% in 2022, it report said.
It added that the worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.1% from the previous year.
Naveen Mishra, senior research director at Gartner, said 2022 will be a growth year as Indian CIOs accelerate their long-term digital initiatives, despite the ongoing Omicron scare in India. “Gartner’s 2022 Indian CIO & IT leader survey indicates increasing investment in artificial intelligence/machine learning capabilities, business intelligence and analytics, and digital business solutions.”
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With these investments, like their global peers, Indian CIOs will also be challenged with skill shortage, leading to increasing dependence on external services partners. This will bolster spending on IT services, forecast to increase 9% from 2021. Cloud-based software consumption will be one of the biggest contributors towards the 15% growth in software segment in India, while the pent-up demand for data centre technologies will lead to 4% for that sector in 2022, it said.
Within the enterprise application software market, the cloud segment was larger than the non-cloud market for the first time in 2020, due in part to the pandemic, Gartner said. By 2025, it expects the cloud market to be twice the size of the non-cloud market.
