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The server market grew by 6.8% to reach $97 billion in 2022; unit shipments were up 5.4% at 29 million and the installed base grew by 2.0% to reach 87 million at the end of the year. In this post I’ll review what happened, why and what that means for the future. Read more »
Mobile devices, in my research, include basic and smart phones, (non-PC) tablets, audio and wearable devices. For the most part their processing is done by ARM chips. They allow us to take computing on the road and form one of the largest and most innovative sub-section of the overall IT market. In this post I’ll look at the shape of the market over the last few years by form factor, region and supplier and share my forecast for coming years. Read more »
The market for IT peripherals covers printers, supplies, digital cameras, mice, replacement keyboards and like products. It is dominated by printer suppliers who own the patents, manufacturing capabilities and patience to build financially-sustainable models in which consumers and enterprises purchase an initial product and then spend incrementally on supplies – such as paper, printer and toner cartridges – to keep them running. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed the printer market dramatically – office employees working from home have little need for print-outs. Although it was also a boon for suppliers of PC add-ons (keyboards, mice, mobile speakers, etc.) such as Logitech, the market has seen a multi-year decline. In this post I’ll look at whether (and how) peripherals vendors can create a positive market momentum in the coming years. Read more »
The PC market was stalled by the pandemic in 2020, grew dramatically in 2021 and began to shrink in 2022, when supplier revenues began to fall. 2023 is going to be another difficult year due to market saturation in many wealthy countries and a focus of suppliers on newer IoT-based devices steal spending away from this product area. In this post I look at what happened in the last year. Read more »
Welcome to my predictions for the ITC market in 2023. It follows my self-assessment of last year’s set, which I believe would have been more accurate if Russia hadn’t decided to invade the Ukraine. The war will continue – possibly throughout 2023 – making this year just as difficult to predict; strategic planning will become even more difficult if China decides to attack Taiwan, or North strikes out at South Korea.
In 2023 we will also still be dealing with the consequences of the pandemic, which started in 2020. The supply chain problems we suffered then were replaced by strong growth in the hardware markets, which have now leveled out, while the under-immunized Chinese population spreads new serious consequences at home and abroad.
In 2023 I’m expecting a rebound in component markets – especially in disk drives, NAND and DRAM, where new higher capacities will come on stream, fuelling a growth in ITC hardware in 2024. For the time being inflation, national currency declines against the $US in EMEA and sluggish or declining GDP will make many eke out the life cycles of their installed PCs, smartphones, servers and storage systems.
The conclusion of recent COP27 climate talks in Egypt show that the world’s major polluters are still avoiding the major steps needed to prevent continuing crises. The ITC industry is capable of being part of the solution through minimizing waste and virtualizing business and social interactions; however things won’t start to get better before the world moves away from electricity generation from fossil fuels, especially coal. On a smaller scale the smelting of iron from electricity, as opposed to coke, would help direct us towards a more sustainable future.
My predictions for the coming year are:
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.
Today IBM launched its Diamondback automated tape system. It joins the TS4500 as a resource for backing up, archiving and protecting massive amounts of data. The advantages of these systems include:
There’s been some discussion of the profitability of the microprocessor market in the press in the last week, so I wanted to share some of my research to add to the debate. My Figure above shows the profitability (net profit/revenues) of the suppliers in the microprocessor market. I’ve chosen to show this on a rolling 4 quarter basis (i.e. the 4 trailing quarters are shown in each value). Read more »
IBM acquired Red Hat in 2018. Since then Red Hat has operated as a semi-autonomous company with IBM using its expertise to enhance its own software developments and its OpenShift management software as a pivotal part of its hybrid multi-cloud strategy. Read more »
IBM has improved its world-beating storage system security even further with its latest software releases announced last week. Its strategy is to protect corporate data from:
While widening the use of automated backup procedures and orchestrated data recovery. Its enhancements are targeted at Chief Information Security Officers, IT architects, data protection operators and application owners. Read more »
Today IBM is launching its latest enterprise Linux server. It’s a high-end system for enterprise customers and cloud service providers, based on technology found in its IBM z16 server, launched in April. This open, enterprise server gives customers the ability to run Linux at scale, but not the IBM Z stack that the z16 runs, such as z/OS, CICS, IMS and other IBM proprietary mainframe software.
The new machine has some very impressive specifications. In particular:
The IT and communications industry is massive and vital to the world economy. During the pandemic we saw an acceleration of cloud computing and remote networking to help companies and individuals put up with a period of unprecedented isolation and worry. I want to share with you my analysis of the size, movement and importance of our industry in the two and a bit years since the beginning of 2020. Read more »
IBM introduced the Power10 processor and its first use in its Power E1080 server back in September last year and launched the new IBM i OS 7.5 in May this year. Today it fills out the Power10 server line along with impressive performance results, new ways to buy, better security, new cloud integration capabilities and enhanced security. I was pre-briefed by Steve Sibley, VP IBM Power Product management and his team to bring you this analysis at launch. Read more »
Jimmy Tam, CEO of Peer Software recently outlined his company and how it helps enterprise customers to manage and secure the massive growth in storage capacity (see my Figure above for the annual worldwide shipped capacity of HDD, NAND and DRAM since 2003). Read more »
IBM Storage recently introduced the third-party Predatar, which adds backup anomaly detection, automation and orchestration for users of Spectrum Protect. It’s part of how IBM provides logical, operational and physical data air-gapping aligned with NIST’s Cyber Security framework (see my Figure above based on IBM’s).
Today it’s announcing its own IBM Spectrum Sentinel, which provides automated cyber resiliency and data recovery for those securing Epic medical records. It is an end-to-end solution covering the copy management/recovery orchestration and the anomaly detection in primary storage. Read more »
The mobile device market is massive – in 2021 there were 1.7 billion shipments worth $545 billion and an installed base of 3.7 billion. Growth in the year was 25% in spending and 8% in shipments, although the installed base didn’t grow. The number of non-Internet enabled basic phones and audio devices continued to shrink, highlighted by Apple’s recent withdrawal of its iPod. Read more »
ESS is a software defined storage solution incorporating IBM’s Spectrum Scale software and its Global Data Platform. It is storage designed for customers who need simple, automated ways of building and running modern (often container-based) applications including those that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Read more »
The PC market has been revitalized by the pandemic. In 2021 spending grew by 19% to $217 billion, shipments by 4% to 281 million; even the installed base grew – by 5% to 967 million (my figure above shows annual growth rates since 2006). If no one had more than a single machine, 12% of the world’s population would have a PC. The average price of PCs increased in the year due to shortages of material and other supply chain challenges. The continuing war in Ukraine will is making things even tougher in 2022. Read more »
The software market is the smallest if the four categories in the IT and communications market. In 2021 it accounted for $1.4 billion in revenues, $337 billion in net profit and employed 11.3 million. Of the seven constituent offerings, application software was by far the largest (36.6%), followed by SaaS (25.3%), operating system (16.3%), custom (10.6%), database (8.3%) and analytics (3.0%). I show the spending trends in each offering in the Figure above. However spending alone doesn’t tell the whole story, as the widespread use of open source code not only fuels the business, but is also the foundation of huge financially immeasurable activities. Read more »
The pandemic has changed the enterprise IT market, stimulating growth overall, a faster shift to cloud services and traditional managed services and outsourcing. Having brought to you my analysis of the server, storage system and enterprise network markets in 2021 in the last few weeks, I want to draw a picture of the wider market in 2021. Read more »