My Figure shows annual growth and absolute spending forecasts for the largest ITC offerings in 2021 (here the bubble sizes also show the spending total). The largest of these will be Wireless communications, on which spending will decline by (only) 0.6% in the year. Here there will be a balance between bigger declines in mature communications markets in which the number of subscriptions are greater than the total population and immature ones (especially in Africa) where there will be significant growth in the year.
The highest growth – for the fourth year running – will be Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which I forecast to grow by 19.7% in the year to (just) $122 billion. Close behind will be Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will grow by 10.5% to $66 billion. These (together with Software as a Service (SaaS) make up cloud services, which will represent only 5% of the total spend on ITC in 2021, despite their high growth rates. Cloud computing is no longer a new thing – businesses will continue to try to balance and secure it against their on premise computing and IT services in ‘hybrid multi-cloud’ strategies.
The peripheral market has performed poorly over the last few yearsas physical processes have been replaced by digital ones. The area covers many different products and services, of which printers (both laser and ink jet) predominate. Nevertheless it also includes a number of products which can help us during the pandemic, such as web cams and 3D printers. Let’s look at how the market developed in 2019. In 2021 I expect it will be the poorest performing ITC offering, declining by 8.9% to $132 billion.
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Information Technology and Communications research
