• Combined effects of Brexit and the Covid-19 public health interventions will cause spending in EMEA to decline this year.

Dubai: Information technology spending in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) is expected to increase next year as organisations start reconfiguring their business and operating models for a new reality and shift the areas they are spending in.

Covid-19 had dealt a blow to IT spending this year but next year, the spending is expected to grow by 2.8 per cent to $1.07 trillion.

However, IT spending in 2021 will still be less than in 2019.

For 2020, the spending is expected to decline by 6.5 per cent to $1.05 trillion compared to $1.12 trillion in 2019.

John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice-president at Gartner, said that the combined effects of Brexit and the Covid-19 public health interventions will cause spending in EMEA to decline this year.

Before the pandemic, he said that most organisations moved their digital strategies forward at a steady pace.

“The way forward in 2021 is for organisations is to increase, rather than decrease, the speed of their digital business initiatives and fund those initiatives by diverting funds from other areas of IT,” he said.

Spending on enterprise software will witness the biggest year-on-year growth of 6.1 per cent to $130.82 billion, followed by datacentre systems by 4.1 per cent to $51.88 billion and IT services by 2.5 per cent to $291.95 billion.

Strategic workforce policy

Devices spending by organisations will move from a decline of 15.1 per cent in 2020 to an increase of 1.7 per cent in 2021.

As per Gartner stats, thin and light notebooks spending is on pace to grow 10 per cent and desktop-as-a-service platforms spending will achieve a steep increase of 60 per cent in EMEA in 2021.

Ranjit Atwal, research vice-president at Gartner, said that the pandemic has forced employers to adopt remote working, turning it into a strategic workforce policy.

 “Mobile PCs are a necessity for remote work and EMEA organisations will re-focus some spending on mobile PCs,” he said.

The speed at which remote working is occurring varies considerably around the world depending on IT adoption, culture and mix of industries.

The US will lead in terms of remote workers in 2021, accounting for 52 per cent of the US workforce.

Across Europe, UK remote workers will represent 48 per cent of its workforce in 2021, while remote workers in Germany and France will account for 38 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively.

Investments in delivering technologies to support remote workers will fuel spending on these technologies in EMEA by 5 per cent in 2021.

Organisations in EMEA will increase their total spending on collaboration and content platforms (17 per cent), security software (11 per cent) and cloud conferencing unified communications (4 per cent) in 2021.