This blog lists the top 10 worldwide predictions for the IT Industry. These technology predictions are meant to help the enterprise with strategic planning within a typical five-year business planning cycle.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/unforeseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy. A large percentage of a future enterprise’s revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data resources.
As a result, the global economy remains on its way to its “digital destiny,” as most products and services are based on a digital delivery model or require digital augmentation to remain competitive. The majority, 65%, of global GDP will be digitalized by 2022, driving $6.8 trillion of IT spending from 2020 to 2023.
This means that CIOs are looking forward to their mid-term and long-term IT challenges, opportunities, and needs, and should know how the IT industry can support these needs.
IDC’s worldwide IT Industry 2021 top 10 predictions are:
- Prediction 1: By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned, 80% of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic.
- Prediction 2: Through 2023, reactions to changed workforce and operations practices during the pandemic will be the dominant accelerators for 80% of edge-driven investments and business model changes in most industries.
- Prediction 3: By 2023, 75% of G2000 companies will commit to providing technical parity to a workforce that is hybrid by design rather than by circumstance, enabling them to work together separately and in real time.
- Prediction 4: Through 2023, coping with technical debt accumulated during the pandemic will shadow 70% of CIOs, causing financial stress, inertial drag on IT agility, and “forced march” migrations to the cloud.
- Prediction 5: In 2022, enterprises focused on digital resiliency will adapt to disruption and extend services to respond to new conditions 50% faster than ones fixated on restoring existing business/IT resiliency levels.
- Prediction 6: By 2023, an emerging cloud ecosystem for extending resource control and real-time analytics will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere.
- Prediction 7: By 2023, driven by the goal to embed intelligence in products and services, one-quarter of G2000 companies will acquire at least one AI software start-up to ensure ownership of differentiated skills and IP.
- Prediction 8: By 2024, 80% of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers, and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and for autonomous IT operations.
- Prediction 9: By 2025, 90% of G2000 companies will mandate reusable materials in IT hardware supply chains, carbon neutrality targets for providers’ facilities, and lower energy use as prerequisites for doing business.
- Prediction 10: Through 2023, half of enterprises’ hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in building IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools/skills.
Want to dive deeper into IDC’s IT Industry predictions? Explore the biggest takeaways and surprises from our FutureScape on our video series. Watch now:
