Networking is vital to the digitization of the world – so useful during the pandemic, when meeting each other face-to-face became difficult and, at times, illegal. This is one area of the ITC market that is not dominated by US vendors. The strong presence of Nokia and Ericsson (see my Figure above for the annual revenues of the major suppliers since 2003) as well as Huawei and ZTE give Europe and China respectively strong current roles. These – added to Japanese and US suppliers – make this one of the most internationally balanced businesses in our industry. Read more »
Storage systems 2021 – stable spending in a sea of change
The worldwide storage systems hardware market grew by just 2% in 2021 to reach $34.8 billion, which proved yet again that the success of these products has become increasingly unconnected with that of raw storage, which grew by 19% growth in the year. My Figure above shows total spending by year for storage systems verses three types of storage devices. Read more »
Raw storage in 2021 reaches 3.6ZB capacity, $182B spending, 1B shipments
The raw storage market is made up of three offerings – NAND and DRAM (both solid state storage), Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). 2021 was a year of tremendous growth in capacity – up 18% to 3.6ZB (ZetaBytes) – and spending – up 19% to $182 billion. I included this area in my 2022 predictions, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at it in a bit more detail. Read more »
IBM launches the IBM z16 – the world’s first quantum-safe server with on-chip AI inferencing
IBM has launched its new IBM z16 mainframe today. Based on its IBM Telum Processor, announced in August last year, the new system has been based on over 1,100 hours of co-creation with more than 70 of its mainframe customers and partners. The new server extends the technical leadership IBM already has for providing ‘systems of record’ to the largest enterprise organizations in the world and will be available from the very end of May. Read more »
Server market grows 4% to $91 billion in 2021 – could have been more
In 2021 the worldwide server market grew by 4% to $91b. I show market shares for revenues, shipments and the installed base in my Figure above. I want to update you on the current state of the market and its leading players. Read more »
IBM LinuxONE – beats x86 servers for environmental sustainability
The way data centers are built, populated with equipment and run is key to the world’s attempts to combat climate change. The pandemic has made more of our financial, social and work interactions digital, which can be witnessed in worldwide spending trends (my Figure above gives the trends and my forecast for the purchasing of cloud services and enterprise hardware). Spending on cloud services grew by 57% between 2019 and 2021 compared with just 4% for enterprise hardware – adding to an 18% growth for both combined. Read more »
IBM’s new FlashSystems – better speeds, feeds, integration and cyber protection
IBM today launches a number of market-leading hardware products based on its new, third generation, FlashCore Module. Not content just to keep technically ahead of its competitors, it continues to work hard to integrate these offerings into its wider approach to hybrid multi-cloud computing, its cyber resiliency services and new (previously non-IBM) customers. Read more »
ITCandor’s 2022 predictions for the New Year
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. Read more »
Spending in the Americas grows 8%, Asia Pacific 6% and EMEA 2%
ITC spending in the Americas will grow the most (by 8%to $2.8 trillion) largely due to the USA’s more interconnected economy, greater wealth and an easier path to ‘building back better’ and the strength of the dollar. Read more »
Global supply chain problems continue, extending hardware life cycles and second-hand sales
Many of us forgot how dependent the just-in-time delivery of IT and communications offerings was on a successful, growing economy. Disruptions in the last few years have largely been blamed the effects of the pandemic on component manufacturing, although we should also look at increased nationalism (Trump, Putin, Brexit, etc.) and climate change events as a causes. Read more »
Government counter-measures fight back against cyber crime
It’s been a long time since we were able to protect our computer environments just through purchasing and running ant-virus software. We now have safeguarding, monitoring and counter-measures to address the many threats – helping to create a preparedness to handle, isolate and recover from attacks.
Cyber criminals have grown in the sophistication of their attacks (sometimes with the support of governments in the USA, Russia and China). In 2022 we’ll see a number of successful attempts by governments to take down major cyber criminals, exposing who they are, retrieving some of the money paid out to randsomware attackers and imposing sanctions against specific suppliers and countries in extreme cases. However a number of governments will continue to spread disruption in competing nations through tolerating (or in some cases) supporting cross-national cyber crime.
Navigate our predictions – intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
The total ITC market grows by 4% to reach $7.6 trillion; net profit, by 9% to $1.3 trillion
Spending on ITC in 2022 will grow 4% to reach $7.5 trillion and vendors will grow their net earnings by 5% to $1.2 trillion; both of these sums will be world records. Read more »
Spending on software grows 7%, IT service and hardware by 5% each, while spending on telecom service stays level
Spending on IT services (the largest of the four categories) will grow by 5% to reach $2.6 trillion in 2022. Read more »
Cloud spending growth flattens – SaaS will be (just!) 18%, IaaS 13% and PaaS 13%; in total these offerings account for $430b
I’m proud to have seen the potential of cloud computing way back in 2008. Spending growth has been continuously high in every year since then; it will reach a new high of $430 billion in 2022 Read more »
American suppliers increase their combined global ITC market share to over 50%
American suppliers combined will increase their market share of the world market to over 50% for the first time in years in 2022. Read more »
‘as a service’ offerings and hybrid multi-cloud architectures become the norm in enterprise computing
Each generation of enterprise computing (centralized, client-server, Internet, managed services, cloud) has created disruption and inefficiencies in integration of the new with the old. Leading suppliers such as Cisco, IBM, Oracle, HPE, Huawei, Atos, Fujitsu and Hitachi will attempt to hang on to their customers’ budgets by promoting ‘as a service’ offerings in 2022 and most have the ability to integrate this new style of support with the physical equipment, software and services they’ve sold them in the past.
Many of these have offloaded their traditional managed services and outsourcing businesses over the last few years – many will now compete with them through standardizing architectures and simplified service delivery. Time will see whether customers are prepared to modernize the infrastructures enough to take advantage.
Navigate our predictions – intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Raw storage shipped capacity exceeds 4 Zetabytes in 2022
The capacity of raw storage shipped continues to grow exponentially (see my Figure above). In 2022 this growth will create 4 Zetabytes of capacity – a massive amount so large that it’s difficult to comprehend. Read more »
ITC will be more of a solution to, than the cause of, the challenges of a difficult year
My final prediction is that ITC will help combat the serious challenges we face in 2022. Read more »
ITCandor 2021 predictions – a self-assessment
Before publishing my predictions for 2022, it’s time to appraise those made for this year – which was the second year badly affected by 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 world market for IT and communications will fall 1% to $6.8 trillion | 3 | It will grow by 10% to $7.2b and would have grown more but for (mainly semiconductor) supply chain problems |
| 2 | ITC spending will grow most in China, shrink most in the UK | 3 | China (6% in local currency) was stronger – and the UK (3%) weaker – than most; the USA (+13%) saw the strongest large market |
| 3 | Software will be the only category to see growth | 6 | Hardware (+13%) had the highest growth, IT Service and Software (+12%) had the next largest |
| 4 | IaaS will grow most, Peripherals least | 5 | IaaS spending grew by 23%, peripherals by 8%; the largest growth was actually gaming consoles (30%) and the worst enterprise telecom services (-6%) |
| 5 | The rise of small business as an ITC buyer | 10 | Spending by small companies grew by more than large, medium companies or consumers |
| 6 | Taxation and recession will challenge the $10 billion supplier club | 3 | All of the companies making >$10b net profit in 2020 have made even more in 2021; The EU and other countries are looking to make taxes fairer at a national level |
| 7 | Governments and big business strengthen protection from (mutating) cyber crime | 8 | A number of stronger precautioins are being taken and a number of ‘strike backs’ against the criminals |
| 8 | Millions will stay working from home, even when the pandemic ends | 10 | Yes – despite many governments encouraging ‘back to the office’ campaigns, the pandemic continues to prevent it for many |
| 9 | 55 million gaming consoles will ship | 10 | 32m sold by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo in the year to Sept; 4th quarter is booming |
| 10 | The ITC industry takes strides to counter global warming | 5 | Not really; various pledges are being made, but 2021 has seen no major initiatives by our industry |
At 63% accuracy this was the worse result of all the predictions I’ve made since setting up ITCandor; the reason… I significantly underestimated the huge success vaccination programs would have in speeding up economic recovery and mildly under-rated the extent to which the ITC industry has and is helping to connect people virtually when physical meetings are difficult. I’ll try to better this year!
Networks – a tale of two cities and failing trust
Despite on-going sanctions and lobbying by the US against Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese suppliers on the grounds that their ties with the Chinese government and governance could/might/have exposed users of their networks to data leakage espionage, the market remains strong. In the year to the end of June 2021 the world spent $213 billion on network hardware, split 72:28% between those sold to service providers and enterprises respectively. Read more »