The most significant IT trends of 2013 are familiar -- mobility, cloud computing, social technologies, and big data -- but the new year will bring a new urgency as enterprises look for vendors to move past exploratory roadmap stages and deliver genuinely competitive products and services, says research firm IDC in its annual predictions forecast.
In the big picture, IDC says worldwide IT spending in 2013 will exceed $2.1 trillion, up 5.7 percent from 2012. The biggest driver of that growth will be mobility: Sales of smart mobile devices including smartphones and tablets will grow by 20 percent, generate 20 percent of all IT sales, and drive a whopping 57 percent of all IT market growth. Excluding smart mobile devices, IT industry growth will be just 2.9 percent.
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The surge in mobility will lead to mobile devices surpassing PCs as the method of choice for online access. The number of people accessing the Internet through PCs will shrink by 15 million over the next four years, while the number of mobile users will increase by 91 million. In 2015, U.S. consumers accessing the Internet through mobile devices will outnumber those using PCs to access the Internet, IDC predicts.
Another driver of industry growth is emerging markets, where IT spending is projected to grow by 8.8 percent to more than $730 billion, or 34 percent of all IT spending. The rate of growth in emerging markets is twice that of developed countries, IDC says.
As vendors work to compete more aggressively in mobility, cloud, social and big data, market-share upheaval seems inevitable.
In software, for instance, SaaS vendors will grab one or more of the top share positions in the majority of the major application software markets within the next three years, IDC says. In servers, Amazon -- the largest cloud service provider -- will become a top 2 or 3 server/virtual machines vendor by 2016, the firm predicts.
Another example is in the data center arena, where converged systems and software-defined networks (SDN) will open the door for leadership shakeups. Specifically, the SDN market is forecast to reach $3.7 billion by 2016 and account for 35 percent share of Ethernet switching in the data center (up from almost negligible penetration in 2012). "Major networking vendors -- including Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, and HP -- are encountering both massive risk and major new opportunities to dominate what is becoming a radically new networking landscape," IDC asserts.
