Global technology analyst firm reveals positive outlook for IT spending during Gold Coast event
Australian CIOs are expected to direct a large amount of funding toward data and analytics and generative AI, among other key technology, areas in 2024, according to new data from Gartner.
The announcement was made during Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo on the Gold Coast in Queensland this week, where VP Analyst Andy Rowsell-Jones, said that amidst an anticipated inflation rate decline to around 3.25%, more money would be available to IT departments.
The analyst firm forecasts that IT spending in Australia will exceed $133 billion next year, up 7.8% from 2023.
According to Gartner, the largest amount of new or additional funding in 2024 will go towards cybersecurity, cloud platforms, data and analytics, and application modernization.
Based on its 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Survey, Gartner suggests that more than 62% of Australian CIOs expected to increase investments in cloud this year, while reducing IT spending in their own data centres.
This was reflected by slower growth in data centre systems spending in 2023, experiencing a 6.4% decline, but Gartner forecasts this will rebound to 5.1% growth in 2024.
Generative AI technologies are also anticipated to see increased investment in 2024, particularly in software development and code generation domains. Gartner suggests that the incorporation of generative AI into enterprises will primarily be facilitated through existing spending channels.
“Generative AI tools are reducing the barriers to entry for software development, which means more digital capabilities are now lying outside the core IT organisation,” Rowsell-Jones said.
“Australian CIOs should harness this capability and provide the guardrails to support and facilitate business technologists in the wider organisation.”
IT services was forecasted to remain the largest IT spending category in Australia, with an estimated value of over $48.8 billion in 2024, a rise of 8.2% from 2023.
Check out Gartner's original post by clicking here.
Earlier this year, at a data and analytics summit in Sydney, Gartner presented several data science and machine learning trends, particularly highlighting machine learning and generative AI's relevance.
Gartner predicted that by 2024, half of new cloud system deployments would leverage cohesive cloud data ecosystems over manually integrated solutions.
The analyst firm also forecasted that 55% of deep neural network data analysis would be happening at the edge by 2025.
