If we look at the long-term development of the ITC market by broad categories of offerings (see my Figure) we see that both IT Service and Software have been growing faster than Telecom Service and Hardware. In 2020 I expect this trend to continue; the strongest growth will be in the software area (+3.0% to $1.163 trillion), followed by IT service (+1.8% to $2.019 trillion) and Telecom Service (up +0.7% to $2.334 trillion); I expect hardware spending to decline by 2.2% to $1.333 trillion.
I expect spending on software to overtake hardware in 2026 and IT to overtake Telecom Service sometime after that. However I would guard you against making too many decisions on the differences between categories; the growth of cloud computing demonstrates how hardware can be sold ‘as a service’, but the industry still needs to build and runs servers.