IT spending in India to touch $90 billion in 2019: Gartner

Driven by digital business transformation initiatives from both private and public enterprises, India's IT spending is poised to hit $89.2 billion in 2019, an increase of 6.7% from the estimated spending of $83.6 billion in 2018, Gartner said on Wednesday.

Both the private and public sectors have become adaptive to business model change and bringing in new practices, developing new capabilities and creating new ways to succeed in the digital world, the global market research firm said.

"In particular, three segments are on pace to bolster IT spending levels in India in 2019. Spending on devices (PCs, tablets and mobile phones) is set to total $33 billion in 2019, a growth of 7.4% year-over-year (YoY)," Ganesh Ramamoorthy, Managing Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement.

Mobile phones are contributing to the growth in the segment and it is led by the continued shift from feature phones to smartphones.

"This has led to the rising average selling price (ASP) of mobile phones in India, positioning it as having the third-fastest device market growth," Ramamoorthy added.

Focus on providing a better customer experience is increasing spending on enterprise application software.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is driving growth in almost all software segments in India and the customer relationship management SaaS market in India is among the fastest-growing in the world.

"Enterprise software spending is forecast to amount to $6.3 billion and grow 12.9% in 2019," added John Lovelock, Research Vice President at Gartner.

Spending on IT services is projected to experience the highest growth in 2019 with a 13.5% increase (YoY).

In this segment, both business process outsourcing (BPO) and consulting segments are bolstering the growth of IT services spending in the country.

The BPO segment is projected to reach $1.7 billion and is on track to achieve 18.5% growth, which is the highest 2019 growth rate of the IT services segment.

The consulting segment has been ranked second, totalling $4 billion -- a 15.9% increase, said the report.