In preparation for my eighth annual predictions since founding ITCandor I need to make a self assessment of our published expectations for the current year. My biggest disappointment is my prediction of small global market decline, when in fact the market will grow (2.9%) for the first time since 2012. As usual in recent years wild currency fluctuations have continued to plague those of us trying to calculate country, regional and global growth. As always the statistics I quote here are entirely home grown and I share much more detail than I publish on this site at a country or offering level with my clients. My table shows how I score each of my last predictions.
Table – ITCandor 2016 predictions – a self-assessment
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The world ITC market declines by 1.2% to $5.8 trillion | 5 | The market will grow for the first time since 2012; 2.9% to $6.1T |
| 2 | EMEA and the Americas outgrow Asia Pacific – at least in constant dollars | 5 | In ‘current dollars’ Asia Pacific will grow 4% – 1% more than the Americas and 2% more than EMEA; in local currency EMEA will be worst, AP will be slightly better than the Americas |
| 3 | The USA grows faster than other American countries | 10 | The USA will grow by 3.3% – the others by 2.3% |
| 4 | Turkey top, Russia bottom of EMEA growth (again!) | 10 | Turkey will see growth of 3.9%, Russia a decline of 3.5% |
| 5 | Chinese spending declines in the lacklustre Asia Pacific market | 5 | China will grow by 1%; Asia Pacific has begun its recovery; Indonesia will see the strongest growth |
| 6 | Raw storage and services drive Big Data growth | 7 | Disk grows as new capacities come to market, NAND and DRAM revenues decline, storage services grow |
| 7 | Cloud Computing continues to surge – SaaS is the star | 7 | SaaS will grow 20.3%, IaaS/PaaS by 30.5% each |
| 8 | Applications dominate in the shift towards a ‘Software Defined’ future | 10 | Applications will be 55% of all software spending in the year; server revenues grew by 2.8%, units by 5.8% in the year to September |
| 9 | Small businesses spend more, consumers less in 2016 | 8 | Small businesses represented 34% of all ITC spending to the end of Q3; consumer spending grew 1.8% and was 40% |
| 10 | Manufacturing and ‘Other’ lead among vertical markets | 7 | Manufacturing has spent 1.3% more on ITC than in 2015 in the year to the end of September and remains the biggest business sector (12% of all including consumer); education saw the strongest growth at 2.0% |
Source: ITCandor, 2016
So overall my accuracy was 74% – less than for 2015 (84%) and 2014 (78%). I won’t excuse myself by saying we live in uncertain times, but it’ll be even tougher to make forecasts for 2017 – a year in which the UK’s impending Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency will be just 2 of entirely new changes to the world’s social, political and economic environment.