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!
Earlier this week IBM announced the introduction of the Express version of its LinuxOne III mainframe range, which was launched exactly a year ago. This is an entry-level model designed for enterprise customers looking to adopt OpenShift and take advantage of much cheaper-than-x86 processing of relevant workloads. 
