IT market research agency IDC has revealed its projections for telecom services spending — by retail subscribers and enterprises — for 2017.
Telecom services will increase by over 2 percent in constant currency terms this year — driven by fixed and mobile data services. Voice revenues will continue to decline.
China and India will post overall IT spending growth of 10 percent this year.
Meanwhile, Gartner said spending on telecommunications services will increase 0.3 percent to $1,374 billion in 2017 and 1.6 percent in 2018 to $1,400 billion after dipping $1,374 billion in 2016.
IDC said ICT spending including telecom services will reach $3.5 trillion in 2017. IT spending is expected to increase by 4.5 percent in 2017 in constant currency terms to $2.1 trillion – driven by investment in Cloud infrastructure and mobile devices.
Last year, IT spending alone increased 2.5 percent.
IT spending is forecast to increase by 4 percent in 2018.
The report said technology companies will achieve strongest growth in infrastructure hardware, enterprise software, and mobile devices segments.
With cloud service providers expected to accelerate their datacenter investments in order to keep pace with growing demand for cloud services, total server spending will increase by 4 percent this year and 5 percent in 2018.
Enterprise spending on server and storage infrastructure will also pick up in the second half of 2017, driven by product refresh cycles. Demand for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will remain robust, with spending set to exceed $25 billion this year and more than $50 billion by 2020.
Smartphone spending will increase by 7 percent this year to $439 billion, a big improvement on last year’s 1 percent growth.
“Cloud and mobile are still the big drivers for IT spending, despite the attention devoted to new technologies like augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics,” said Stephen Minton, vice president, Customer Insights & Analysis at IDC.
Software spending will increase by 7 percent to more than $471 billion — driven by enterprise investment in big data and analytics alongside ongoing adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other key growth segments.
IT services spending will post growth of 3 percent, led by project-oriented services.
High-end servers will post double-digit decline this year. Hardcopy peripheral spending will fall for the second year in a row. Tablet spending will decline again, despite improving sales of hybrid and detachable models. Sales of traditional PCs and external storage systems will be broadly flat.
Enterprise network equipment and traditional outsourcing services will face slowing growth.
Gartner said on Thursday that IT spending will grow 2.4 percent to $3.5 trillion in 2017.
Spending on devices including PCs, tablets and mobile phones will grow at 3.8 percent to $654 billion.
The sale of mobile phone will be driven by increased average selling prices (ASPs) for premium phones in mature telecom markets due to the 10th anniversary of the iPhone.
“Digital business is having a profound effect on the way business is done and how it is supported,” said John-David Lovelock, vice president, Gartner, in a statement.
Enterprise software market is forecast to grow 7.6 percent in 2017. As software applications allow more organisations to derive revenue from digital business channels, there will be a stronger need to automate and release new applications and functionality.
