Before publishing my predictions for 2023, it’s time to appraise those made for this year – which covered most of the third year of the pandemic. As always, I’ve marked each between 1 and 10 based on their accuracy.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The total ITC market grows by 4% to reach $7.6 trillion; net profit, by 9% to $1.3 trillion | 4 | The total market looks like growing by 1% to $7.1 trillion, but profits will decline by 14% to $978 billion |
| 2 | Spending in the Americas grows 8%, Asia Pacific 6% and EMEA 2% | 6 | The Americas will grow by 9%, but asia Pacific will be down 3% and EMEA, down 4% |
| 3 | Spending on software grows 7%, IT service and hardware by 5% each, while spending on telecom service stays level | 6 | Software will grow by 4%, IT Service by 6%, but hardware growth was zero and telecom service was down 7% |
| 4 | Cloud spending growth flattens – SaaS will be (just!) 18%, IaaS 13% and PaaS 13%; in total these offerings account for $430b | 7 | Cloud growth flattened; SaaS will grown 12%, IaaS and PaaS by 9% each; the total will be $402b |
| 5 | Global supply chain problems continue, extending hardware life cycles and second-hand sales | 10 | Yes – the sluggishness of hardware sales shows customers are keeping their products longer |
| 6 | American suppliers increase their combined global ITC market share to over 50% | 10 | Yes – I calculate that their share will be 57% in 2022 |
| 7 | ‘as a service’ offerings and hybrid multi-cloud architectures become the norm in enterprise computing | 8 | The focus on Digital Transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, makes this de rigor for large organizations (at least) |
| 8 | Government counter-measures fight back against cyber crime | 6 | The war between Russia and the Ukraine has increased cyber security measures, but only a few countries have jailed too few hackers |
| 9 | Raw storage shipped capacity exceeds 4 Zetabytes in 2022 | 2 | Capacity has fallen to 2 Zetabytes as hardware markets stalled |
| 10 | ITC will be more of a solution to, than the cause of, the challenges of a difficult year | 8 | Yes – video calling and the growth of IoT enabled consumer hardware has made upm for higher prices |
At 67% accuracy this was another poor year for my forecasts; I can perhaps excuse myself by noting that the ‘territorial conflicts between Russia and the Ukraine’ mentioned at the beginning of last year’s predictions escalated into a full-scale invasion.