Infotech Lead India: IT spending in emerging markets including India will grow by 8.8 percent in 2013 to more than $730 billion.
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 dominate IT spending among emerging markets with China capturing more than a quarter of this spending.
Developments in emerging markets will start to reshape key global markets because of their oversized share of industry growth.
According to IDC, for 2013, 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 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 favorable year-over-year comparisons.
“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 realize: 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.
In the battle for primacy over the mobile operating system market, 2013 will be a critical year for Microsoft and Research In. Samsung will explore their OS options, including Linux/Tizen, as a hedge against the growing market dominance of Android.
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 commoditized 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.
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).
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.
Big data will grow 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.
