IT Services Market to Reach $731 Million in 2020

Over the next couple of years, the IT and business services market will cross a big milestone.

For the first time, the world’s providers of IT and business outsourcing and services firms are expected to generate more than $1 trillion in yearly revenues in 2018, according to a forecast released today by IDC. Leading the charge are IT services companies.

While businesses embark on digital transformation, they’ll increase their reliance on outside experts that can help them harness the benefits of mobility, the cloud and other game-changing technologies.

The vast majority of enterprises are digitally enabling their workforces, at least on some level. Recently, a survey from Logicalis Group, an IT and managed services provider, revealed that just 5 percent of organizations are sitting on the sidelines as the digital transformation trend rewrites the playbook on running a modern business.

Over the next few years, it will be up to those services providers that are paid to assist those businesses to keep their skills sharp and their competencies on the cutting edge.

“As digital transformation involves significant changes to people and business processes as well as technology, most buyers will engage an outside services firm to help them along their transformation journey, ” said Rebecca Segal, group vice president at IDC Worldwide Services, in a statement. “As the demand for these services grows, often in double digits, service firms who invest in the right skills and assets around IDC’s Third Platform of cloud, big data, social, and mobility, as well as Innovation Accelerators such as next generation security and IoT [Internet of Things], will see their growth prospects shift away from legacy IT services, which are on the decline and towards the digital opportunity that lies ahead.”

This year, the IT service providers are expected to rake in $649 billion, a figure that is expected to rise to $731 billion in 2020. Also predicted to make big gains is the business services market, with $287 billion in revenue this year and $369 billion in 2020.

Altogether, spending on IT and business services providers are poised to reach $936 billion by the end of this year and $1.1 trillion in 2020. Organizations will spend more than $98 billion on cloud-related services, said the analyst group.

“Project-oriented and outsourcing services produce the majority of spending in cloud-related IT services driven by a high demand for cloud platform adoption,” observed IDC research manager Lisa Nagamine, in a statement. Spending on cloud-related services will nearly double, she added.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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