Before publishing my predictions for 2024, it’s time to appraise those made for this year – which saw the attack by Russia on Ukraine continue and a new war start as Israel devastates Gaza following Hamas’ atrocious terrorist attack. As always, I’ve marked each between 1 and 10 based on their accuracy.
At 67% accuracy this was another poor year for my forecasts; I can perhaps excuse myself by noting that the ‘territorial conflicts between Russia and the Ukraine’ mentioned at the beginning of last year’s predictions escalated into a full-scale invasion.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The total ITC market will fall by 2% as inflation, war and a resurgent pandemic restrict growth | 4 | It was a poor year for sates with 0% overall growth. COVID-19 infections continue, Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues; while war in the Middle East has flared. Inflation reared up and is now being addressed by many governments. |
| 2 | ITC spending in EMEA will grow faster than in Asia Pacific, while that in the Americas continue to outstrip both | 4 | The Americas will grow by 1%, Asia Pacific by 2% and EMEA by 0% in 2023. |
| 3 | Manufacturers and large retailers industry will begin to deploy private 5G infrastructures for machinery, drones and office productivity | 8 | IoT and 5G solutions began to be widely adopted, although not at the dramatic speed predicted by some. |
| 4 | ‘hybrid’ cloud will move from a generic description to a number of specific solutions served by specific vendors and service suppliers | 8 | Google’s definition is still wide, AWS’s and Azure’s is ‘cloud+on premise’ resources; IBM’s is specific to combinations of its own environments and public clouds. |
| 5 | Chinese ITC spending will decline as it fails to manage the resurgent pandemic | 7 | The market declined by 2% when measured in current dollars; it grew by 3% when measured in Yuan Renminbi. |
| 6 | Cyber security spending will increase significantly as hackers exploit the rapidly expanding IoT threat landscape | 10 | Cyber security grew by around 8% in 2023. Trend Micro and others are addressing the IoT threats well. |
| 7 | Cloud services will grow by 6% only, as enterprises spend to connect them securely to on premise production systems | 5 | IaaS/PaaS look likely to grow by 12%; SaaS by 15% in 2023 – down on 2022, still stronger than I expected. |
| 8 | Raw storage will increase as new products with much higher capacity come to market | 2 | Spending on HDD, NAND and DRAM all decreased significantly in 2023. |
| 9 | Consumer products get IoT-ified en masse | 8 | Watches, home security devices and vehicles led the transformation in 2023. |
| 10 | War breaks the global ITC market – better sponsor national/regional component manufacturing | 7 | War expanded to new theatres; new chip plants and alliances spread to mitigate single points of failure in the global market. |
With a score of 63% my predictions were not the greatest of the 15 published here. The most obvious omission was the dramatic rise in the deployment of generative AI solutions by public cloud suppliers – an area I will be addressing in my 2024 ideas.