Growth despite Covid-19
While the market for IT consulting and personnel services/staff leasing has shrunk sharply, cloud-related services have almost maintained the growth momentum of the pre-crisis period. On the one hand, the crisis has created enormous cost pressure in many industries; on the other hand, it has prompted many companies to accelerate their digital transformation.
The growth themes have remained more or less the same. The strongest drivers for growth and change remain cloud transformation as well as analytics, AI (artificial intelligence) and automation, supported by agile and DevOps models. These levers play a key role in digital transformation.
Overall, a significant recovery is expected for 2021, starting from a low comparative level. At global level, a similar growth rate to 2019 can be expected for both software and IT services, although there will be significant differences between the segments (products and services, industries, themes, countries and regions), as in 2020. The cloud remains the most important growth driver. Excluding public IaaS/PaaS, growth of 3.2 percent can be expected for the IT services market.