Its time to make predictions for 2021; but before I need to appraise those made for this year – which proved to be one of the most disrupted due to the pandemic. As always, I’ve marked each between 1 and 10 based on their accuracy.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The overall ITC market will grow by 0.8% to $6.849 trillion | 10 | I was spot on on the absolute value. ITC has proved a vital aid during the pandemic |
| 2 | The Americas will lead regional ITC spending growth | 10 | Growth in the Americas was 2%; Asia Pacific was -2%, EMEA was 0% (at current $ exchange rates) |
| 3 | Spending on software will grow most, while hardware spending will decline | 10 | Software grew 8%, hardware decline 4%; IT services grew 3%, Telecom services declines 3% |
| 4 | The business market grows; the consumer market continues to fall | 4 | Consumer spending grew by 0.8%, business by 0.9%. The pandemic changed demand |
| 5 | IT Services spending grows most on IaaS and PaaS cloud services, while other offerings ‘flat line’ | 8 | IaaS grew by 27%, PaaS by 25%; other IT service spending grew by 3%; again the pandemic raised demand |
| 6 | The only hardware spending growth will be on solid state disks and processors | 7 | Processor sales grew 2%, but so did gaming consoles (22%) and PCs (3%); everything else declined |
| 7 | Wider adoption of 5G allows spending on mobile telecom service to grow | 4 | Despite its vital role in the pandemic, telecom mservices declined; wireless was down 3%, while broadbandwas stable v 2019 |
| 8 | SaaS and Infrastructure will lead the software market | 7 | SaaS saw the strongest growth (14%), but Infrastructure (6%) was outgrown byOS (11%), application (8%) and database (7%) software |
| 9 | Raw storage shipments exceed 2 Zetabytes | 10 | The number was exceeded in the first 3quarters |
| 10 | Governments move against those trading data from social networking | 7 | The EU Digital Markets Act will address some concerns; on the whole governments were too busy with the pandemic to do much |
Overall I claim an 77% accuracy for the year – worse than last year hardly surprisingly.