It’s come to that time of the year when we gaze into our crystal ball and make some predictions for the coming year, but first we want to do some self-assessment of what we said would happen in 2013.
| No. | Expectation | Comment | Score/10 | |
| 1 | The ITC market drops 3.2% to $6.4T- net profit stays strong | Spending dropped 1.6% to $6.6T, net profit up 30.9% to $722B | 7 | |
| 2 | Spending down 5.1% in the Americas, 4.1% in EMEA and 0.7% in Asia Pacific | Americas +1.3%, Asia Pacific -5.2%, EMEA -3.2% | 5 | |
| 3 | BRIC, Switzerland and Romania are only countries to grow – steep decline in the West |
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4 | |
| 4 | PC markets decline, smart devices continue to overtake – OS, SaaS, storage grow | All true apart from storage | 8 | |
| 5 | Cloud Computing is still countervailing – grows just 2% | True, but grew 4% | 7 | |
| 6 | Consumer spending falls 4%; business sectors drop – large by less than SMB | Consumer grew 1.6%, rest true | 5 | |
| 7 | Spending in Health and Education sectors grow – all others decline | Health and Education were the strongest | 9 | |
| 8 | MSPs And Cloud Services change distribution channels dramatically | True – MSPs build out and public Cloud services adopted | 10 | |
| 9 | Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems become key offerings | True – all system vendors adopt CIandIS | 9 | |
| 10 | Corporate and Social Responsibility strategies address user and employee communities | Lots of privacy concerns and spying cases | 7 |
Overall we did well, scoring 7.1% out of 10. We were right to predict a decline in spending for the year, but overestimated it – it looks as if 2013 will finish down 1.6%, rather than by 3.2% as we predicted. Net Profit also grew massively, as we predicted. We were right that Microsoft’s business would improve and Apple would do worse. We were right to say that large company would be stronger than small and medium company spending, however we were wrong to say that consumer spending would decline – it will actually grow by 1.6% in the year. We were almost right when it came to EMEA – predicting a 4.1% decline as opposed to the -3.2% it will experience. However there will be a 1.3% growth in The Americas, rather than the 5.1% decline we forecasted. Asia Pacific will be worse than we predicted.
On a country level it looks as if we were mostly wrong in our predictions – more (and different) country markets grew. The biggest surprise is the growth in Japan, where there has also been a major shift in the exchange rate of the Yen against the $US. While spending in Health and Education were the strongest of the 11 vertical markets we size, each declined slightly rather than grew as we predicted.
On the non statistical predictions we were pretty much spot on. We have seen a major shift from physical to vertical offerings in the channel – especially in the UK and the USA. Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems (CIandIS) have had major success, with spending reaching 4% of data centre spending by the end of this year. On CSR there was much evidence of causes for concern – especially about American and UK governments accessing private emails; however the recession is still preventing many companies from developing stronger policies for their various stakeholders.
In the coming weeks we intend to publish a new set of predictions for 2014 – concentrating as always on market spending directions and major market themes. Our intention is to help you work out what’s going to grow and what isn’t. It’s going to be more fun this time as there’s going to be more growth than in 2013. Stay tuned.
