Information Technology confidence, spending up across various industries

Improvements and stability in business information technology confidence across a range of industries involving healthcare, will drive stronger IT spending growth this year, in accordance to a new study by International Data Corp.

Professional services firms, involving cloud service providers, will increase their information technology confidence spending by 6% in the year of 2017, while IT budgets in the financial services sector will rise by more than 5%, the IDC research predicts.

By the year of 2021, IT spending will reach $2.7 trillion, with the largest contributions coming from consumers, banks, manufacturers, and telecommunications providers.

Cloud service providers are anticipated to resume data center investment growth in the second half of 2017, after a brief slowdown, and this will drive server and storage spending by professional services firms to almost 9 percent growth this year.

Enterprise buyers are also poised for a server upgrade cycle this year, IDC claimed, driving positive growth in spending across vertical industries. Enterprise software spending remains strong, led by professional services (up 9%), followed by banking, securities and investment services, retail and healthcare (all up 8 percent).

Total annual software spending will surpass $600 billion by 2021, with the largest contributions coming from manufacturing, banking and professional services, the report stated.

"The banking industry indicates highly positive indicators for spending plans, with key projects focused on big data and analytics," said Jessica Goepfert, program director for customer insights and analysis at IDC. "Nearly all of the major banks around the world have highlighted that their [big data analytics] deployments are now a critical part of their competitive strategies. This is particularly the case on the retail banking side, as the banks establish their omnichannel strategies, seek to understand and respond to their customers' behavior, and build strategies for excellence in customer experience."