According to Kable analysis, optimism in the retail sector is driving growth in ICT spending.

52 percent of retailers planned to up their spending in 2015, in contrast to 30 percent of retailers planning to increase IT spending in 2014.

The report found that 16 percent planned to decrease investment in ICT compared to 28 percent in the previous year.

In addition, 33 percent maintained the budget at the same level, compared to 40 percent in 2015.

In most areas, how this budget was allocated was fairly similar between 2014 and 2015. However, hardware, where most of IT budgets are spent in the retail industry, saw a minor rise, from 24 percent to 26 percent.

Meanwhile, services, communications and consulting all saw their budget allocations fall.

The report also revealed that retailers placed more faith in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) investments in 2015. While software-as-a-service (SaaS) budgets fell from 36 percent of the cloud computing budget to 33 percent, IaaS budgets rose from 34 percent to 36 percent.

Platform-as-a-service saw its budget allocation rise from 30 percent to 31 percent.

In addition, there was an increasing proportion of investment going into hybrid cloud as opposed to private and public between 2014 and 2015.

Private cloud remained the dominant choice, attracting 52 percent of planned cloud investment in 2015; however, this was a fall from 2014’s figure of 59 percent.

Public cloud, meanwhile, saw investment rise from 21 percent in 2014 to 23 percent planned in 2015. Hybrid cloud saw a bigger rise, from 21 percent to 25 percent.

There were also considerable shifts in how budgets were allocated by function. Network in 2014 attracted 19 percent of the budget, with plans to decrease it to 15 percent in 2015.

There was little variation in allocation to end-user computing, data centre and the service desk, which moved from 19 to 18 percent, remained static on 17 percent and fell from 16 to 15 percent respectively. The communications budget rose from 11 to 12 percent while management fell from 10 to 9 percent.

Applications, meanwhile, saw a rise from 9 percent to 14 percent.

All figures come from Kable‘s ICT Customer Insight survey, which polled 163 respondents from the retail sector. Subscribe to Kable here.