The analysts over at IDC reckon that 2010 is going to be a year of “recovery and transformation”. On the recovery side, they’re expecting global IT spending to increase by 3.2%, returning to 2008 levels but a large chunk of this spending is going to occur in the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
But more interestingly, the transformation part is going to be increased adoption of cloud services and the arrival of “enterprise-grade cloud services” and complementary application platforms. IDC thinks this will be the most important development for the next 20 years particularly when linked in with the growth in mobile devices.
Regarding mobile, IDC sees these competing with PCs as user’s main devices, with over 1 billion mobile devices, fuelled by increasing adoption of smartphones and Apple’s iPad tablet. They predict over 300,000 iPhone apps and 5x growth in Android apps. Interestingly, they also predict “apps stores” for netbooks, which I think has already been evidenced by moves from Intel.
Other predictions include “socialytic” apps which mashup business apps with social networks, further reductions in CO2 through IT solutions and more mergers, acquisitions and partnerships.
Personally, I think the cloud services linked to mobile devices is right on the money. I’ve recently started using a Palm Pre and it links to several on-line services including Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote. Looking at just Google, there are connections to Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Reader and I’m expecting Tasks, Documents and Notebook to be available before long. So I’m already living in the cloud and I love it.
The whole press release is over at IDC.