Mumbai, Jul 19 (IANS): The end-user spending on IT services in India is likely to reach $18 billion in 2021, an increase of 10.7 per cent from last year, a Gartner report said on Monday.

The consulting segment will be the largest in terms of end-user spending in 2021, likely to to reach $4.6 billion this year, up from $4.1 billion in 2020.

Hardware support will be the only segment where spending will decline in 2021. It will decline 2.8 per cent as end-user organisations reduce their spending on client device support and data centre support systems, the report said.

"The Indian IT services market has proven its durability through the last 15 months of the pandemic. The surge in remote working, need for business continuity planning and increased focus towards digitalisation has increased the demand for IT services," said Arup Roy, research vice president at Gartner.

In 2021, the end user spending on IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) will total $1.6 billion, growing 57 per cent as compared to 2020.

While IaaS is expected to contribute to 9 per cent of the total spending on IT services in the country in 2021, by 2025, spending on IaaS is forecast to make up 22.7 per cent of the total spending on IT services in the country.

"Organisations in India are moving towards a cloud-only or a cloud-first model, which is why spending on IaaS will experience strong growth in 2021," Roy said.

Indian enterprises are demanding more agility, rapid innovation and a swift move towards becoming a composable enterprise resulting in an increased adoption of cloud through 2021, he added.