5G, SD WAN, NVMe over Fabric will drive ITC hardware growth

Most hardware sub-markets will decline in 2019 (see my Figure). Only processors and solid state disk (NAND and DRAM) will see significant growth, while the mobile device market will also grow (just). We have to turn to smaller sub-segments of these classes to pick out the real winners in the year. In particular:

• 5G wireless networking will begin to be rolled out after a number of important trials run mainly in conjunction with Huawei. Sales of associated wireless cards (for computing and IoT devices) and base stations will help make up for the decline in other networking equipment to create a relatively level market in comparison with 2018.
• SD WAN implementations will continue to grow, which will also contribute to the network equipment market.
• NVMe over Fabric is an important new direction for the storage market, based on NVMe solid state drives which are built to communicate with processors at a much higher rate than older protocols such as SAS and SATA. In 2019 we will see a growth in SAN storage as a result of NVMe being applied to Fibre Channel and Ethernet. In turn this will bolster the overall storage systems, server and infrastructure software markets in the year.

Beyond hardware I expect IaaS and PaaS cloud services, security software and services (especially MDR) and systems management software to help drive their respective categories – see my Figure for a comparison of each of these below.

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