New Delhi, April 30 : Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, growth in india's domestic software is expected to drop to 4.1 per cent in 2020, as compared to 2019 growth rate of 16.7 per cent, according to an International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast on Thursday. The decline in growth rate is likely because enterprises relook at their buying decisions owing to increased focus on profitability, said the IDC 's "Worldwide Black Book Live Edition, March 2020" report. However, there will be a demand for productivity applications as the remote workforce increases. Collaborative application vendors are looking at making minor adjustments and offering the premium version through a minimum price subscription model. Apart from collaborative tools, cloud platforms, security solutions, and automation technologies, most of the other applications will post only marginal growth, IDC said. "IT vendors are gearing up to adapt and transform the way of doing business, in a bid to support their clients during these testing times," Shweta Baidya, Senior Research Manager, Enterprise Software & IT Services, IDC India said in a statement. "Although IT spending will be impacted, specific solutions such as conferencing and collaboration, secure endpoint and network management, CRM, cloud storage, backup & recovery solutions, and remote support & services will continue to witness a steady rise amidst the crisis," Baidya added. Overall, India domestic IT spending (hardware, software, and services) is expected to drop to minus 4.5 per cent as compared to 2019 growth rate of plus 9.1 per cent, as per the IDC forecast. The hardware segment will contribute the most to this decline, while growth in IT services is expected to be almost flat at 6.9 per cent as enterprises look at maintaining the status quo on IT services contracts. On the IT services side, endpoint and network services will witness a stronger demand because of extended remote working options. Hardware and software implementation or integration services will be slightly impacted because of the non-deployment/non-availability of new hardware or software. IDC warned that renewal of long-term IT services contracts will be delayed by a few quarters and organizations will adopt a wait and watch approach for non-critical IT spending. However, enterprises are also looking at cloud options for business continuity, infrastructure services, and application management, it said. /IANS