2013 Will Be Dominated By Mobile, Cloud Developments: IDC

For the past several years, the IT industry’s transition to the 3rd Platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and Big Data analytics technologies, has dominated the annual Predictions from International Data Corporation (IDC). For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to the 3rd Platform will shift into high gear as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high stakes competition.

“The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/Big Data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realise: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market,” said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC. “Companies that are not putting 80 percent or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP.”

For 2013, IDC predicts worldwide IT spending will exceed $2.1 trillion, up 5.7 percent from 2012. The biggest category driving this growth will once again be smart mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, eReaders), which will grow by almost 20 percent in 2013 and generate nearly 57 percent of the industry’s overall growth. Excluding mobile devices, the IT industry’s growth is forecast to be just 2.9 percent. Among the other major IT categories, worldwide software and services spending are forecast to grow 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively. The PC and server markets are also expected to return to modest positive growth in 2013, aided in part by more favourable year-over-year comparisons.

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On a regional basis, IT spending in emerging markets will grow by 8.8 percent in 2013 to more than $730 billion. While this figure represents 34 percent of all IT spending worldwide, it represents more than 50 percent of all new growth in the IT marketplace. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will continue to dominate IT spending among the emerging markets with China capturing more than a quarter of this spending. Equally important, developments in emerging markets will start to reshape key global markets because of their oversized share of industry growth. As an example, IDC expects China’s ZTE to compete for a position among the world’s top three smartphone makers based on its phenomenal growth rate and strong position in emerging markets.

As noted above, mobile devices will continue to be a significant driver of worldwide IT spending. But the anywhere, anytime access offered by these devices is also changing consumer behaviour as more and more people turn to their smartphones and tablets as their primary means of going online. This trend will be further accelerated by the popular embrace of “mini tablets” (sub-8" tablets) in 2013. IDC predicts this segment will account for as much as 60 percent of the 170 million tablets shipped in 2013.

In the battle for primacy over the mobile operating system market, 2013 will be a critical year for Microsoft and Research In Motion. Both vendors need to capture much greater interest from mobile app developers to expand the number of apps that run on devices powered by their respective operating systems. Failure to do so by the end of 2013 will likely be the beginning of their demise in this market. Meanwhile, hardware vendors like Samsung will explore their OS options, including Linux/Tizen, as a hedge against the growing market dominance of Android.

Cloud will also be a powerful contributor to industry developments in 2013 with the merger & acquisition (M&A) activity of the past 20 months actually accelerating. IDC expects to see over $25 billion in acquisitions over the next 20 months as cloud services become the centerpiece of more and more vendors’ offerings. As packaged application providers like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle become software as a service (SaaS) providers themselves, they will increasingly battle with SaaS pure plays like Salesforce.com and Workday for leadership in some of the major application software markets.

Elsewhere in the cloud, IDC expects 2013 will see an explosion in industry PaaS (public platform as a service) offerings as the market moves up the software stack and “horizontal” PaaS becomes commoditised by platforms built on open source-based infrastructure. In industry PaaS, cloud-based shared services environments are being tailored to the needs of a specific industry, while additional industry-focused solution developers are developing and deploying a range of industry-targeted value-added solutions and services on these platforms. Examples of emerging industry PaaS include: NYSE Capital Markets Community Platform in financial services; numerous health information exchanges in healthcare; and Johnson Controls’ Panoptix App Marketplace in smart energy.

The trend toward industry-specific solutions will be further driven by the increased participation of line of business (LoB) executives in IT investment decisions. In 2013, nearly 60 percent of new IT investments will directly involve LoB execs (with them as the decision maker in 25 percent of the investments). As a result, IDC expects that businesses will spend $65 billion on industry-specific solutions in 2013, with a rapidly increasing number of them leveraging 3rd Platform technologies. This figure will grow to nearly $100 billion in the next 3 years as businesses use these technologies and solutions to create new products and services, and redefine existing customer relationships.

All of the trends outlined above – increased use of mobile devices and apps and the migration toward SaaS and industry PaaS – will also drive profound changes in the datacentres and IT organisations supporting these 3rd Platform solutions. Here, converged systems (combining server, storage and network systems together with the software to manage them) and software-defined networking will transition from market hype to market reality in 2013 with enterprise datacentre and cloud-provider use cases coming to market and getting deployed. Both nascent datacentre technologies will show explosive growth in 2013, reaching a remarkable 30-35 percent penetration in the datacentre by 2016.
In the social software market, enterprise software vendors will continue to step up their app transformations with social technology acquisitions, accelerating the buying spree that began in 2011. Look for Microsoft to beef up its CRM/Customer Experience offerings by acquiring a community management platform like GetSatisfaction or Lithium. Similarly, Oracle can be expected to abandon its attempt at creating an enterprise social network and acquire a more robust tool with an existing customer base. Meanwhile, businesses will struggle with enterprise social network sprawl in the transition from experimentation to integration.

Elsewhere, “Bring Your Own Identity” (BYOID) will bring consumerisation to enterprise security in 2013, as security software vendors and IT shops start using Facebook, Google, and other social and consumer cloud identity services as a core part of their identity management environment, giving them the ability to extend identity management from their enterprise out to wider circles of customers, partners, and prospects. It will become even clearer that “consumerisation” is not just about end user devices (smartphones, tablets); but increasingly about many of the core parts of enterprise IT.

Finally, Big Data will continue on its growth path, with investment in technologies and services growing to nearly $10 billion in 2013. But the focus of this investment will see an important shift in 2013, as more VC funding and M&A goes toward the upper half of the Big Data stack: analytics and discovery tools, and analytic applications. IDC expects predictive analytics will be a particular hot spot in the months to come.