Brexit messes up IT project plans
Summary
In the analyst firm’s latest Global tech market outlook for 2020 to 2021 report, Forrester principal analyst Andrew Bartels warned CIOs to get ready to trim back their new project portfolios for the next two years and start looking for ways to contain their other costs. Bartels said in the report: “The slowdown in tech purchases by business and government is real and reflects the fact that business executives are generally reluctant to grow their tech budgets faster than the growth in their revenues.” Referencing the UK’s exit from the European Union on 31 January, Bartels noted that prime minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative majority in Parliament will need to negotiate a transition agreement that still leaves many key issues to be negotiated. “That drop and the ripple effects of Brexit on other European countries will slow the region’s tech market growth to just 0.4% in 2020, with a modest recovery to 1.7% increases in 2021,” he said. Spending on cloud applications and platforms will still grow at double-digit rates, helping to make software the best-performing tech category. But demand for major new on-premise software or hardware systems will weaken as companies and their CIOs become cautious, it said.