IDC pegs India software sector growth at 3.8% in 2020

The software market in India is expected to grow by 3.8% year-on-year (YoY) in 2020 as enterprises reassess their IT spends during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report from data intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC). 

The sector will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.6% during 2019–2024, the research firm said. 

The growth will likely be due to order inflow for remote work and cloud adoption solutions. Enterprises are focusing on operational resiliency, return on investment (ROI) and business continuity plans. Several organisations have put aside all noncritical projects for the next three to six months at least. 

“There will be heightened demand for collaborative applications, application platforms, security software, system and service management software, and content workflow and management applications,” it said.

Technologies such as virtual private networks (VPN), authentication, endpoint security, encryption and application security along with robotic process automation (RPA) are also likely to increase.

"The outbreak of Covid-19 has resulted in the partial or complete transformation of working models with the use of collaborative platforms. New software implementations, upgrades, or migrations will be delayed by a few quarters, unless extremely critical,” Shweta Baidya , senior research manager at IDC India said. 

Earlier this month, IDC had said in a report that the cost of a domain name system (DNS) attack in India, which involves sensitive customer information theft, is close to $800,000 now, a marginal 6% decline over the previous year.

In a report last month, IDC said it expects IT sector growth at 6.5% in constant currency terms to $14 billion by December-end and their spending to fall by 4.1% in 2020.

In a recent report, research firm Gartner said IT spending in India is expected to see a decline of 8% to $83.5 billion in 2020.