Enterprise software is projected to become the fastest growing area of technology spend, topping $11.4 billion in sales in Australia this year.
A report from research firm Gartner estimates that this year enterprise software sales in Australia will grow 12.2 percent compared to 2016, faster than the worldwide average of 7.6 percent.
Gartner vice president and analyst John-David Lovelock said as software-as-a-service enterprise applications become increasingly popular, there is also increased acceptance of IT operations management tools delivered in the cloud.
"These cloud-based tools allow infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations to more rapidly add functionality and adopt newer technologies to help them manage faster application release cycles," he said.
"If the I&O team does not monitor and track the rapidly changing environment, it risks infrastructure and application service degradation, which ultimately impacts the end-user experience and can have financial as well as brand repercussions."
Overall, Gartner projects Australian IT spending to reach $83.1 billion in 2017, which be an increase of 3.7 percent from 2016. Gartner noted that its revised projection was due to the decline in the US dollar.
IT services is still expected to be the largest area of IT spend at $30 billion, followed by communication services with $26.8 billion. Devices and data centre systems sales are expected to grow to $12.1 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, but will both take a dip by 2018.
Australia's growth rate is fast than the worldwide average of 2.4 percent. Worldwide IT sales are expected to reach US$3.5 trillion in 2017, with communications services as the largest category at $1.37 trillion.
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