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Investment in technology products and services is expected to reach $93.3 billion in Australia during 2019, a rise of 3.4 per cent from 2018.
According to Gartner’s quarterly forecast, IT services will make up the bulk of Australian expenditure with $34 billion, followed by communication services at $28 billion.
Other local sectors, including software and data centres, are also expected to see a rise in spending this year, with increases of 10 per cent and four per cent respectively.
Device spending however will continue on a downward decline until 2020, falling from $12 billion last year to $11.8 billion over the next two years as the smartphone market softens.
Meanwhile, global IT spending is projected to total US$3.76 trillion in 2019, an increase of 3.2 per cent from the previous year.
“Despite uncertainty fuelled by recession rumours, Brexit, and trade wars and tariffs, the likely scenario for IT spending in 2019 is growth,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “However, there are a lot of dynamic changes happening in regards to which segments will be driving growth in the future."
Furthermore, worldwide software spending projected to grow 8.5 per cent in 2019, increasing another 8.2 per cent in 2020 to total US$466 billion as the shift to cloud continues.
According to the analyst firm, organisations are expected to increasingly shift to software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Despite the mobile market slowdown, global spending on devices is expected to grow globally by 1.6 per cent in 2019 as highly-saturated smartphone markets, such as China, United States and Western Europe, enter replacement cycles.
"Spending is moving from saturated segments such as mobile phones, PCs and on-premises data centre infrastructure to cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices," Lovelock added.
"IoT devices, in particular, are starting to pick up the slack from devices. Where the devices segment is saturated, IoT is not.”
Lovelock added that firms should increasingly look to investing in skills such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, API and services platform design and data science in order to keep pace with current trends.
