The International Data Corporation (IDC) has said spending on technologies and services to enable the digital transformation (DX) of business and production will exceed €333 billion in 2022. In global terms, Europe sits third place in for DX spending behind the US and China.
In 2019, IDC forecasts that nearly 44 per cent of the €225 billion spend expected for 2019 will be spread across four industries - discrete manufacturing (€34.3 billion), process manufacturing (€22 billion), retail (€22.9 billion), and utilities (€20.2 billion).
The manufacturing industry will be investing the largest amounts into DX, with a particular focus on smart manufacturing, worth more than €24.3 billion, according to IDC. This will be followed by digital innovation (€7.75 billion) and digital supply chain optimisation (€4.8 billion).
"European manufacturing companies are increasingly adopting innovation accelerator technologies," says IDC Customer Insights and Analysis Group senior analyst Neli Vacheva. "The sector is introducing innovation-enabled production processes, advanced asset and inventory management, and new sales models based on IoT, robotisation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and 3D printing. IoT data utilisation efforts has repositioned manufacturers in the value creation chain and transformed entire industrial ecosystems.”
Meanwhile, the European utility industry will be investing almost €12 billion into digital grid to develop predictive grid management and digital grid simulation.
Across all industries in 2019, IDC predicts the largest investments in DX use cases to be intelligent and predictive grid management (€10.5 billion), freight management (€9.7 billion), robotic manufacturing (€7 billion), and autonomic operations (€6.1 billion).