HPE announced last week that it is acquiring Juniper Networks for $14 billion. The deal will double HPE’s market share in the overall network market, but will do little to dent those of either Huawei or Cisco – the stand-out leaders of the ‘Service Provide’ and ‘Enterprise’ sub-divisions of the network market. Read more »
ITCandor ITC Predictions 2024 – good and evil
It’s that time of year again…. actually it’s well past that time of year…. for me to be making predictions for the worldwide IT and communications market in 2024. 2023 proved to be a difficult year as the market continued to be affected by the global pandemic and Russia’s unjustified attack on the Ukraine, and made worse by Hamas’s grotesque terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating retaliations in Gaza. We dreamt of autonomous vehicles, only to be rudely awaked to the murderous reality of drones.
These are my predictions:
- The total ITC market will see zero spending growth, remaining level at $7.1 trillion
- ITC spending growth will be bigger in Asia Pacific; EMEA will perform better than the Americas
- Of the major country markets Japan will see the strongest spending growth in 2024
- Software spending growth will be stronger than in IT Services; Telecommunications and hardware sales will decline
- Sales by offering – Software as a Service spending will grow most; Implementation IT services will be the largest
- Spending on raw storage will begin to grow again, following two years of dramatic decline
- Generative AI – especially from large public cloud suppliers will continue to grow at tremendous rates
- Cyber criminals will continue to influence/interrupt/ disrupt national elections in the USA and UK
- Quantum computing will come of age, creating analytic breakthroughs in HPC
- War and terrorism will drive up oil prices, slow the move to green energy and negatively affect ITC supply chains
9. Quantum computing will come of age, creating analytic breakthroughs in HPC
Like AI, quantum computing has promised to deliver big benefits to society over the last few years. I believe we will see substantial improvements in its use for scientific and mathematical analytics in 2024 – benefiting its developers (IBM, Google and others). I hope that its legitimate use outstrips the cyber criminals’ involvement – especially when applied to cracking previously-secure AES encryption. Whether or not this happens, large organizations will need to invest large sums in quantum-safe cryptography in 2024.
10. War and terrorism will keep gas and oil prices high, slow the move to green energy and negatively affect ITC supply chains
The ITC market was once new, offering potential savings in automation and productivity enhancement for early adopters. By 2024 it has become an essential part of almost every product and service we purchase. The market is so large that its size and growth is bound to be tied to the success or failure of the overall world economy. It is also subject to global war and terrorism, which unfortunately will continue to make headlines throughout the year. 2024 will see a delay in the full use of ITC to help us move away from our over-reliance on fossil fuels. War and terrorism will have a direct effect on the availability of certain ITC solutions, as affected countries and regions can no longer be counted on to provide the rare earth metals, manufacturing and (in some cases) developers to maintain a fast conversion from ideas to exploitation.
Whether my predictions come true or not over the coming year I wish all of my readers every success in the ITC markets of 2024. Please let me know your own thoughts and reactions.
Martin Hingley, Didcot, the UK, January 2024
1. The total ITC market will see zero spending growth, remaining level at $7.1 trillion
The 2021-2023 flat-line growth in spending of the ITC industry looks likely to continue. My first prediction (see my Figure above) is for total spending to remain at its current $7.1 trillion level for another year. Although inflation in many markets has been successfully reduced, we have yet to see a significant up-turn in the world economy and, although the creation of ITC products remains global, their deployment within countries is increasingly being limited by legislation, regulation and international politics.
2. ITC spending growth will be bigger in Asia Pacific; EMEA will perform better than the Americas
At a regional level I expect ITC sales in 2024 to grow by 2% in Asia Pacific. I expect sales to very slightly in both the Americas and EMEA since, although there are many immature markets in both, they are dominated by the USA and Western European countries respectively which are extremely saturated. In terms of total spending the Americas will remain the largest (40% of the total), followed by EMEA (31%) and Asia Pacific (39%).
3. Of the major country markets Japan will see the strongest spending growth in 2024
At a country level sales in the USA will continue to be far the largest (31% of the world), although I expect the 2024 total will be very slightly down on 2023. I expect Japan and Australia to see the strongest growth (2.6% in both). Of the other major country markets I expect sales in China, the UK, Canada and Brazil to fall, while France, Spain, Italy and Germany will see between 0% and 1% growth.
4. Software spending growth will be stronger than in IT Services; Telecommunications and hardware sales will decline
In my research I split ITC offerings into 4 mutually exclusive categories. In 2024 I expect that IT Services will remain the largest (39% of the total) with growth in the year of 1.7%. Software (now larger than both Telecommunications and Hardware) will see the strongest growth (5%). I expect sales to decline in both Telecommunications (-3.1%) and Hardware (-5.0%).
5. Sales by offering – Software as a Service spending will grow most; Implementation IT services will be the largest
I split the 4 categories in my research into 32 separate offerings; of these I expect Software as a Service (SaaS) to see the greatest growth in 2024 (14%), followed by Operating Systems (10%), IaaS (9%) and PaaS (9%). Sales of Implementation services (12%) and Applications (11%) will be the largest in the year.
6. Spending on raw storage will begin to grow again, following two years of dramatic decline
I’m nervous to make predictions around raw storage devices following the failures I’ve made here over the last couple of years. There’s no doubt that these markets have proved highly volatile since the pandemic, when not enough of these components were made to meet demand and then were over produced. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that each of the three main constituent types (DRAM and NAND chips, hard Disk Drives) will start to grow again sometime soon; it’s just a question of ‘when’ and ‘by how much’. In 2024 I expect to see growth in each of these areas (see my Figure above). If these do not grow in the year we’ll need to reconsider their hitherto important role in products and the industry and the importance of storage systems within the entire industry.
7. Generative AI – especially from large public cloud suppliers will continue to grow at tremendous rates
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been threatening to take a lead role as a revenue generator in our industry for many years. 2023 was a year in which we saw very dramatic growth from the specialist suppliers involved. My Figure above shows Nvidia’s reported ‘datacenter’ revenues by quarter; this is where it counts sales of its GPUs and associated Infiniband networking). In terms of solutions IBM’s Watson and Watson X alongside cloud-based ones from AWS, Google and Microsoft have also seen dramatic growth. AI will continue to grow rapidly in 2024. Time will tell whether the late moves to address AI ethics and safety through alliances and regional legislation are enough to prevent some major catastrophes as commercial and government organizations begin to deploy generative AI at scale.
8. State-sponsored cyber criminals will continue to influence/interrupt/disrupt national elections in the USA and UK
Both the USA and the UK will have general elections in 2024. Politics in both countries have been badly affected by international (mainly Russian) interference in the past; I believe that the UK’s decision to leave the EU for instance would not have been taken were it not for the billion or so Facebook adverts delivered in the last months and weeks of campaigning. While politicians of all parties now understand how to weaponize Social Media, they are still relatively naïve in trying to prevent it from distorting democratic decisions. I expect that cyber criminals in countries such as Russia and China will attempt and maybe succeed to influence 2024 poles in many countries.
ITCandor 2023 predictions – a self-assessment
Before publishing my predictions for 2024, it’s time to appraise those made for this year – which saw the attack by Russia on Ukraine continue and a new war start as Israel devastates Gaza following Hamas’ atrocious terrorist attack. As always, I’ve marked each between 1 and 10 based on their accuracy.
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.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The total ITC market will fall by 2% as inflation, war and a resurgent pandemic restrict growth | 4 | It was a poor year for sates with 0% overall growth. COVID-19 infections continue, Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues; while war in the Middle East has flared. Inflation reared up and is now being addressed by many governments. |
| 2 | ITC spending in EMEA will grow faster than in Asia Pacific, while that in the Americas continue to outstrip both | 4 | The Americas will grow by 1%, Asia Pacific by 2% and EMEA by 0% in 2023. |
| 3 | Manufacturers and large retailers industry will begin to deploy private 5G infrastructures for machinery, drones and office productivity | 8 | IoT and 5G solutions began to be widely adopted, although not at the dramatic speed predicted by some. |
| 4 | ‘hybrid’ cloud will move from a generic description to a number of specific solutions served by specific vendors and service suppliers | 8 | Google’s definition is still wide, AWS’s and Azure’s is ‘cloud+on premise’ resources; IBM’s is specific to combinations of its own environments and public clouds. |
| 5 | Chinese ITC spending will decline as it fails to manage the resurgent pandemic | 7 | The market declined by 2% when measured in current dollars; it grew by 3% when measured in Yuan Renminbi. |
| 6 | Cyber security spending will increase significantly as hackers exploit the rapidly expanding IoT threat landscape | 10 | Cyber security grew by around 8% in 2023. Trend Micro and others are addressing the IoT threats well. |
| 7 | Cloud services will grow by 6% only, as enterprises spend to connect them securely to on premise production systems | 5 | IaaS/PaaS look likely to grow by 12%; SaaS by 15% in 2023 – down on 2022, still stronger than I expected. |
| 8 | Raw storage will increase as new products with much higher capacity come to market | 2 | Spending on HDD, NAND and DRAM all decreased significantly in 2023. |
| 9 | Consumer products get IoT-ified en masse | 8 | Watches, home security devices and vehicles led the transformation in 2023. |
| 10 | War breaks the global ITC market – better sponsor national/regional component manufacturing | 7 | War expanded to new theatres; new chip plants and alliances spread to mitigate single points of failure in the global market. |
With a score of 63% my predictions were not the greatest of the 15 published here. The most obvious omission was the dramatic rise in the deployment of generative AI solutions by public cloud suppliers – an area I will be addressing in my 2024 ideas.
The AI Alliance – values, nationalities and absentees
This week 57 organizations announced their creation of the AI Alliance – a consortium designed to advance the altruistic use of open source code and methods for the creation of generative AI models (see my summary of their 6 initial ‘values’ in my Figure above). Read more »
Infinidat strengthens its modern enterprise storage system solutions
Infinidat is a modern, growing storage systems supplier with very interesting high-performance products. A private company head-quartered in Herzliya, Israel with its US business based in Waltham, MA., it was founded by Moshe Yanai in 2011 – a key inventor of storage products at EMC and XIV (an object storage supplier acquired by IBM in 2008). Read more »
Storage capacity shipments fall – the end of exponential growth?
Part of the sofftness of the ITC market I’ve pointed to before is due to a fall in the shipped capacity of storage. I wanted to share some of the advanced research I conduct to highlight this area. My Figure above shows the quarterly shipped capacity of the three most important types of raw storage device.
Cisco to acquire Splunk for $28 billion
Last week Cisco announced its intention to acquire Splunk for $157/share, equalling around $28 billion. If it goes ahead it will be Cisco’s largest. Splunk’s total revenues have grown to be roughly the same as Cisco’s security sales (my Figure above). One difference is that Splunk’s business is moving rapidly towards a cloud subscription model (see later); in comparison Cisco’s is dominated by network hardware sales. Read more »
Q2 2023 ITC spending – declines in memory and devices, growth in AI hardware
In the second quarter of 2023 there was a 3% growth in ITC spending to $1.855 trillion and a 10% growth in the total net profit of all vendors to $275 billion (see my précis in the Figure above); however, on an annual basis spending was flat at $7.155 trillion and profits were down 13% at $960 billion. The softness I reported last quarter remains, with a significant downturn in memory (HDD, DRAM and NAND) and devices. As a counterbalance there is a strong investment in general AI by public clouds. I want to share my findings with you and welcome any questions you might have as a result. Read more »
The gaming market – a cloudy future?
The gaming market is founded on proprietary console platforms from three suppliers – Sony (Playstation), Nintendo (Switch) and Microsoft (Xbox). Other software vendors, such as Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, address these platforms only once through being licensed to do so by one of the three suppliers (see my Figure above for their revenue trends, showing the sum of their four quarter sales at the end of each quarter since Q1 2014). Read more »
IBM Storage introduces the Flash System 5045
IBM announced last updated its FS5000 series storage systems in February 2021, having launched them the year before. This week it announced the FS5045, which replaces the FS5035. Like the FS5035, the new product includes
- Data reduction (compression and deduplication),
- Scale-out clustering,
- IBM HyperSwap high-availability and
- Encryption
To differentiate it from the cheaper FS5015, giving it the same enhanced data resilience capabilities available on the higher-end IBM Flash System 5200, 7300, and 9500 models. Like the FS5015, the FS5045 comes complete with a licence to use IBM Spectrum Virtualize for help storage use in multi-cloud environments.
Hardware specifications for the FS5045 include:
- Maximum bandwidth: 12.4 GB/second (v 8GB/second for the FS5015)
- Maximum latency: 70μs
- IOPS: 1.2m
- Processor: Intel Broadwell DE (6 core)
- Disk configuration: SAS SSD, or mixed SAS SSD + HDD
- Maximum disk capacity: 550TB
IBM also announced that the FS5015 and FS5045 can now be covered in its Expert Care Basic and Advanced service contracts. It cut its list prices for its storage systems worldwide by 15% on April 20th this year. This seems sensible given the crashing prices on NAND devices I highlighted in my last post. This is clearly a time for enterprise customers to increase the capacity of raw storage in the arrays they use.