Gartner: EMEA IT spending to see 2 percent increase in 2017

IT spending across EMEA will total $1.25 trillion in 2017, a 1.9 percent increase from 2016, according to analyst Gartner. The analyst house also said IT spending in EMEA will be almost flat in 2016, increasing 0.6 percent year on year.

Spending on devices is expected to decline and to be the main contributor to an overall slowdown in IT spending in 2016. The segments that will contribute most to overall IT spending growth in 2017 are software and IT services.

“Spending on digitalisation is on the rise in EMEA, and we’ll witness some leading organisations modernise their core IT systems and increase spend on software and services in particular, as part of their digital transformation,” said John-David Lovelock, a Gartner analyst.

Spending on data centre systems, particularly servers, would normally grow when spending on software increases, but with the growing adoption of software as a service (SaaS) and other cloud offerings, data centre spending will be “more muted than usual”, said Gartner.

As for Brexit, and increased prices in the UK linked to it, Gartner said: “When the prices of goods increase consumers and businesses shift their buying patterns, and the simple reaction is to buy less well-featured products.

“But now that there are viable cloud offerings in the UK, organisations are also able to shift their spending into different areas — to buy computing as a service, instead of servers. These shifts will play out further in 2017.”

In Western Europe, IT spending is forecast to total $803.5 billion in 2017, a 1.6 percent increase from 2016. IT spending levels in Western Europe are likely to be essentially flat in 2016, with growth of 0.2 percent year over year.

IT services will remain the largest segment in terms of spending, and will continue to grow in 2017 – by 4.1 percent.

Gartner forecasts the PC market in Western Europe will total 47.8 million units in 2016 and to decrease by 3 percent in 2017. Gartner expects PC prices in the UK to increase by less than 10 percent in 2017, as vendors look to “de-feature” their PCs to keep prices down and take advantage of a single-digit decline in PC component costs in 2016.

Smartphone sales in Western Europe will total 147 million units in 2016, a 1 percent increase from last year. Gartner projects smartphone sales to increase 4.7 percent in 2017.

@AntonySavvas