Global IT spending to grow 2.9% in 2017: Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is projected to grow 2.9 percent and reach $3.5 trillion in 2017 whereas in 2016, it is to total $3.4 trillion witnessing a decline of 0.3 percent decline from last year, according to a report by Gartner.

Analysts suggest that the growth in 2017 will be driven by software and IT services segments where .worldwide spending on software and IT is expected to grow 7.2 percent and 4.8 percent respectively.

“Civilization infrastructure will forever change the way people engage socially, digitally, and physically through connected sensors and digital intelligence,” said Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research.

Gartner said that the new digital platform consists of five domains which include traditional IT systems, customer experience, Internet of Things (IoT), intelligence and the ecosystem foundation.

Traditional core IT systems help CIOs run and scale operations while building on what’s already been built.

“You now need to make cloud, mobile, social and data your core capabilities while investing in resilience, business continuity and disaster recovery, inside and outside in a hybrid approach,” added Sondergaard.

Customer experience helps CIOs connect and engage in new ways while IoT changes how CIOs should invest in analytics.

Intelligence helps the systems analyze, learn and decide independently where algorithms determine the action.

“We are building machines that learn from experience and produce outcomes their designers did not explicitly envision. Systems that can experience and adapt to the world via the data they collect,” said Sondergaard. “Machine learning and artificial intelligence move at the speed of data, not at the speed of code releases. Information is the new code base,” he elaborated.

Ecosystem foundation allows transformation from traditional business with linear value supply chains to networked digital ecosystem businesses.