Climbing out of the smoking crater of 2009, the IT and telecom industries will see growth rebound next year amid a set of transformational changes, according to the 2010 outlook from research firm IDC. Driving those transformations will be the spread of cloud-based computing and telephony, the continued explosion in smartphones, and the demand for increased bandwidth to feed demand on both desktop and mobile devices.
“With a global economic recovery widely anticipated, modest growth in IT and telecommunications spending is expected,” the research firm said in its influential Predictions 2010 study. “But the industry is entering this recovery year with an ambitious agenda, making transformation the more interesting theme of IDC's predictions for 2010.”
The global economic recession acted as a “pressure cooker” that sped the development and adoption of new technologies and new business models, explained IDC chief analyst Frank Gens. “What's different about 2010 is that the economic recovery will release some of the pressure on spending, enabling a number of transformational tipping points to be reached in a year of economic upswing."
Telecommunications spending will grow by 3 percent next year, driven largely by the mobile and wireless sector in developing countries and by the continuing migration to IP-based services. Worldwide IT spending, meanwhile, will rise 3.2 percent over this year, reaching 2008 spending levels of about $1.5 trillion.
The primary driving force in both sectors will be “the continuing build-out and maturing of the cloud services and consumption model,” the report stated, with cloud applications platforms achieving new levels of acceptance and importance.
In telecom, the surge in smartphones, and the applications that run on them, will continue to radically alter the industry landscape. By the end of 2010 there will be more than 1 billion mobile devices connected to the Internet. The number of iPhone apps will triple, reaching 300,000, and applications for Android, the open-source mobile operating system from Google Inc. (GOOG), will increase five-fold.
