IT services spends in India to touch $18 bn this year: Gartner

End-user spending on information technology (IT) services in India is estimated to grow 10.7% to $18 billion in 2021, research and consulting firm Gartner said in a recent forecast. Consulting, it said, would constitute the largest end-user spending segment this year at $4.6 billion, up from $4.1 billion in 2020. 
 
Among other key segments, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) would be a $1.7 billion opportunity, growing 57% from $1 billion, on the back of growing cloud-only or cloud-first models being adopted by enterprises.

IaaS would see the highest registered growth rate within all segments of IT services spending in India, the study said. IaaS is expected to contribute to 9% of the total spending on IT services in the country in 2021 and is forecasted to make up 22.7% of the total spending on IT services in India by 2025.  

Spending on business process services would grow to $1.8 billion from $1.7 billion and infrastructure implementation and managed services would be worth $4.6 billion business, up from $4.4 billion. 

End-user spending on application implementation and managed services would grow to $4.4 billion from $4 billion in the previous year. 

“The Indian IT services market has proven its durability through the last 15 months of the pandemic. The surge in remote working, need for business continuity planning and increased focus towards digitalization has increased the demand for IT services,” said Arup Roy, research vice president at Gartner.

“In 2020, spending on IT services slowed, but did not decline. While some digitalization projects were stalled due to IT budget contractions and economic uncertainties in 2020, 2021 is experiencing renewed interest in rapid digitalization from end-user organizations,” he added.

According to the report, hardware support will be the only segment where spending would decline in 2021. It would decline 2.8% as end-user organizations reduce their spending on client device support and data center support systems.

In its April 2021 report, Gartner said expenditure on public cloud by end users in India is expected to grow 31.4% in 2021 to touch $4.4 billion.