India IT spending to dip 8% in 2020 amid Covid-19 pandemic, says Gartner

Information technology (IT) spending in India will see a decline of 8.1 per cent in 2020, the first such fall in the past five years, forecast research firm Gartner. The spend is expected to total $83.5 billion. In 2016, IT spending in India had seen a decline of 1.6 per cent. The spend in that year stood at $67.74 billion. “The fear of a global recession due to the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing CIOs (chief information officers) in India to be very cautious on IT spending this year,” said Naveen Mishra, senior research director at Gartner. “CIOs are reprioritising IT budgets on mission critical initiatives.”
 
This is shifting spending toward technologies such as desktop as a service (DaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), virtual private network (VPN), and security, Gartner said. As a result of this spending, the overall cloud adoption in India has increased.
 
Gartner expects spending on devices and data centre systems in India to see their steepest declines in 2020, at -15.1 per cent and -13.2 per cent, respectively. However, spending on enterprise software is set to record a moderate decline of 2.6 per cent during the year.