IT spending in India may grow 9% in 2018: Gartner

BENGALURU: IT spending in India is expected to grow over 9% to $87.1billion in 2018, a slower pace of growth than in 2017, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

IT spending this year is expected to end at $79.8 billion, up 14.2% from 2016. Next year will see slower growth on all the segments the research firm tracks – communication services, data centre systems, devices, enterprise software and IT services. Enterprise software will grow 15.3% in 2018 to $5.7 billion. IT services will grow 13.8% to $14.3 billion. The devices segment, which is expected to grow over 23% in 2017, will grow 13% to $31.4 billion.

“Increased average selling prices for premium phones in mature markets, partially due to the introduction of the iPhone 8 and X, along with an underlying demand for PCs from businesses replacing their machines with Windows 10 PCs is driving the growth in this segment,” the research firm said in a statement. Indian corporates are increasingly looking at spending on transformational technology as they deal with the burgeoning startup ecosystem in the country.

“About 15% of the total IT spend is now on transformational activities. Companies are making those investments,” Ganesh Ramamoorthy, managing VP, Gartner, said in a press conference.

He added Indian companies were also making investments in technologies such as the IoT, but the early stage of projects made it hard to peg a market size. “Currently in IoT, companies are investing in pilot projects. It is hard to size up the market based on pilots. The scale is still out there,” Ramamoorthy said.