Following up the ‘Australian IT companies lack DevOps knowledge‘ news story, according to Gartner, next year Australian tech spending will rise by 2.6%, but below the 3.1% growth in 2017.

Gartner’s prediction and numbers come from its analysis of sales by vendors across IT products and services, and are looked at by technology companies and executives within businesses and organisations, giving an early indication of trends and commercial challenges.

The report shows the rise of cloud computing in 2018, transforming the way organisations run their systems and access the software that drives their operations.

Enterprise software spending shows growth of 11.3% in 2017, which is predicted to increase by 11.7% next year, making a total US$12.7billion.

Gartner’s managing vice-president, Matthew Boon, said to the Financial Review: “With Microsoft launching Azure data centres in Canberra, and Salesforce now live on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure in Australia, more barriers to using cloud applications are being broken down, especially for the public sector.

“IoT and cloud will each account for high-growth IT spending in general in Australia, particularly in several industries, with IoT as an innovation driving IT spending growth in manufacturing and utilities, and cloud driving growth in the government and transportation sectors.”

Written by Leah Alger