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Here’s a piece of bad news for the information technology industry. The industry in the country is projected to decline by 8.1 per cent this year as businesses and organisations are expected to be prudent in their spending in the times of a global crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is going to hit the spending of businesses and organisations on information technology.
Spending on devices and data centre systems in the country are going to witness steepest declines yet in 2020.
Research firm Gartner has pegged the IT spending in the country at $83.5 billion, showing a decline of 8.1 per cent in 2020.
“This is the first decline in IT spending experienced in the country in the last five years. The fear of a global economic recession due to the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing CIOs in India to be very cautious this year,” Naveen Mishra, senior research director at Gartner, has said.
Spending on devices and data centre systems is expected to go down by 15.1 per cent and 13.2 per cent respectively.
“The Chief Information Officers will consider extending life cycles of their existing device assets which will delay new purchases,” he said. They are working with their Chief Financial Officers to reworkIT spends.
CIOs, according to him, are ensuring business continuity through remote working and workforce collaboration.“This would mean shifting of spending to technologies such as desktop as a service (DaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), virtual private network (VPN) and cyber security,” he said.
Some upswing
There, however, is a silver lining. Technologies such as tele-health and e-learning software will see a spurt this year.
“The lockdown measures forced sectors such as education, healthcare, and public utilities to accelerate their digital transformation,” Mishra said. Sectors like retail, insurance and banking will continue to spend on digital initiatives such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and virtual sales assistants.
They, however, will reduce or stop spending on business transformation, process re-engineering and moderniation of existing systems.
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