I’m not surprised my predictions of 2021 were more inaccurate than in earlier years. We are living through unprecedented changes in society due to serious weather events created by global warming, an on-going pandemic with the potential for devastating viral mutation, serious territorial conflicts between Russia and the Ukraine, China and Taiwan, growing inflation in most countries and continuing conflict and social unrest in Afghanistan and Syria.
IT and communications use has helped enormously in the last few years and will do so again in 2022, but the early hopes of a quick return to ‘the new normal’ will be dashed. We will need to use ITC tools as counter-measures to the continuing crisis, while ITC suppliers need to get their own houses in order, aspiring to be part of the solution rather than part of the cause.
Many other research houses and vendors continue to babble in marketing-speak, while I try to address and discuss in simple English.
I wish everyone in our wonderful industry a Happy New Year… and I don’t expect this set of predictions will be any better than last year.
These are my predictions:
- The total ITC market grows by 4% to reach $7.6 trillion; net profit, by 9% to $1.3 trillion
- Spending in the Americas grows 8%, Asia Pacific 6% and EMEA 2%
- Spending on software grows 7%, IT service and hardware by 5% each, while spending on telecom service stays level
- Cloud spending growth flattens – SaaS will be (just!) 18%, IaaS 13% and PaaS 13%; in total these offerings account for $430b
- Global supply chain problems continue, extending hardware life cycles and second-hand sales
- American suppliers increase their combined global ITC market share to over 50%
- ‘as a service’ offerings and hybrid multi-cloud architectures become the norm in enterprise computing
- Government counter-measures fight back against cyber crime
- Raw storage shipped capacity exceeds 4 Zetabytes in 2022
- ITC will be more of a solution to, than the cause of, the challenges of a difficult year