IT services spend to touch $ 7.2 billion this year, Gartner says

Government of India’s total expenditure on IT products and services is estimated to be $7.2 billion in 2016, according to Gartner Inc.

“Government spending on software will total $885 million in 2016, a 4.5% increase from 2015,” said Moutusi Sau, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The software market will be led by growth in applications.”

The expenditure is an increase of 2.4% over 2015 and includes spending on internal services, software, IT services, data centre, devices and telecom services.

Sensing the increasing need for mobile apps and software the American research and advisory firm predicted this increase in Government of India’s expenditure.

The IT industry, including consulting, software support, business process outsourcing, IT outsourcing, implementation, and hardware support, is expected to grow 9.3% to reach $ 1.8 billion with the business process outsourcing sub-segment growing 21%, the report stated.

Telecom sector is predicted to be a $1.6 million with the mobile network services sub-segment recording the fastest growth with 5.2% in 2016 to reach $909 million.

Internal services will growth 5.8% in 2016 to reach $1.5 billion. Internal services refer to salaries and benefits paid to the information services staff of an organization. The information services staff includes all employees that plan, develop, implement and maintain information systems.

Gartner has ranked the top five Indian IT service providers as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and HCL Technologies.

 “The e-governance initiatives to simplify digital channels and data-driven initiatives are driving investments in the government and are anticipated to grow through 2020. The ‘Digital India’ initiatives are making government processes streamlined and integrating the data repositories,” said Sau.