Before publishing my predictions for 2025, it’s time to appraise those made for this year – which saw a strong spending growth – especially on servers and GPUs for the rapidly developing AI markets. Raw storage devices (HDDs, NAND and DRAM chips) also saw tremendous growth in spending. At 66% accuracy, there was no major improvement from last year. Please find my appraisal of each of the 10 predictions below.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The total ITC market will see zero spending growth, remaining level at $7.1 trillion as war and terrorism escalate | 2 | The market will actually grow by 3% to $7.5 trillion – driven by the purchasing of AI servers and a renewal of PC and smartphone markets.. |
| 2 | ITC spending growth will be bigger in Asia Pacific; EMEA will perform better than the Americas | 2 | In current $US calculations regional growth in 2024 was 4% in the Americas, 3% in EMEA and 2% in Asia Pacific. In local currency, it was 4%, 2% and 3% respectively. |
| 3 | Of the major country markets Japan will see the strongest spending growth in 2024 | 7 | This will be true for 2024 when measured in current $US; however in local currency the market in Japan will decline by 1%. |
| 4 | Software spending growth will be stronger than in IT Services; Telecommunications and hardware sales will decline | 2 | Hardware grew 7%, IT Service 5% and Software 2%; Telecom Service declined 3% in 2024. |
| 5 | As for sales by offering – Software as a Service spending will grow most; Implementation IT services will be the largest | 7 | Spending on SaaS will be 6%, but be beaten by servers (28%), IaaS (13%) and PaaS (12%). Implementation will be largest at $840b. |
| 6 | Spending on raw storage will begin to grow again, following two years of dramatic decline. | 10 | Absolutely true. In the year to Q324 HDD, NAND and DRAM spending grew by 41%! |
| 7 | Generative AI – especially from large public cloud suppliers will continue to grow at tremendous rates | 10 | Absolutely true. Nvidia’s revenues grew by 152% and Supermicro’s by 154% in the year to the end of Q324. |
| 8 | Cyber criminals will continue to influence/interrupt/ disrupt national elections in the USA and UK | 8 | In the UK, China was named behind the theft of 40m elector records – however for a hack in 2021/2. The 2024 US presidential election was declared ‘the most cyber-secure’ to date by the CIS. |
| 9 | Quantum computing will come of age, creating analytic breakthroughs in HPC | 8 | While still a mystery to many, vendor efforts continued. IBM introduced its Heron chip and Google – its Willow. Apple introducing quantum-safe encryption. |
| 10 | War and terrorism will drive up oil prices, slow the move to green energy and negatively affect ITC supply chains | 10 | There was a escalation in Russia’s attack on Ukraine; Israel spread its attacks from Gaza to the Lebanon and Iran. |
Most importantly I significantly underestimated the spending growth of raw storage devices, AI server and GPU deployments. On balance I seem to be better at predicting world events than the details of the ITC industry – I’ll strive to do better in future!