10 predictions for the technology sector in 2014

Spending on IT will increase worldwide by 5% on the previous year, reaching $2.1 trillion in 2014. Spending on cloud and its technology will increase by 25%, passing $100 billion. These are some of the ten predictions made by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a US-based market research and analysis company that specialises in IT, telecommunications and consumer technology, and which shall affect the technology sector in 2014. We provide a short explanation of the future in store for the IT sector below.

1. Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% year on year to $2.1 trillion in 2014. Spending will be driven by 3^rd platform technologies, which will grow 15% year over year. Smartphones and tablets will also be key in leading growth, in addition to spending on servers, networks, software and services. The PC market will continue to fall.

2. Emerging markets will record growth of at least 10%. This will drive nearly $740 billion, or 35% of worldwide IT revenues. In Brazil, Russia, India and China, IT spending will grow 13% year on year. IT spending in China will match that of the United States.

3. Amazon as a platform. Amazon Web Services will roll out improvements, such as a platform-as-a-service for developers and higher value services for businesses, which will see these used as platforms and not as infrastructure. The current suppliers, including Google, will have to fight for position in the marketplace.

4. The importance of 3^rd platform applications. In a sector where the main competitors aren’t going to make drastic changes to their cloud systems, the arrival of third platforms that add innovations to Microsoft, IBM, Amazon or Salesforce will be key.

5. Expansion of third platforms. These platforms will expand beyond smartphones, tablets and PCs, and become the ‘Internet of Things’, to create integrated offerings in the consumer electronics and connected device spaces.

6. Apple vs. Android. Tablet sales will grow by 18% and smartphones by 12%. The Android community will continue leading the market, with increased revenue through Google Play. Apple will continue in second place, but will increase revenue with higher average selling prices. Microsoft needs to quickly double mobile developer interest in Windows Phone.

7. Cloud spending will surge by 25% in 2014, reaching over $100 billion. IDC expects to see a dramatic increase in the number of datacentres and the variety of workload-specialised cloud infrastructure services, leading to new forms of differentiation among cloud service providers.  

8. Spending on big data technologies and services will grow by 30% in 2014, surpassing $14 billion. A large portion of this spending shall be on the development and optimisation of data platforms in cloud. Content providers and data brokers will proliferate along with enterprises and developers.

9. Datacentres will grow in number and importance. As a direct consequence of the growth in cloud storage services, datacentres will gain importance because cloud service providers will increasingly drive the market for servers, storage and networking components.

10. Enterprise applications will increasingly integrate social technology. Social networks will become increasingly available as standard offerings from cloud services providers. This will enable enterprises to further embed social into the workflow, rather than having a separate “social layer”.