ITCandor Expectations 2013

1. The ITC market drops 3.2% to $6.4T in 2013 as the Euro Crunch thickens – net profit stays strong
2. ITC sales in the Americas drop by 5.1%, in EMEA by 4.1% and in Asia Pacific by 0.7%
3. BRIC, Switzerland and Romania Are only countries to grow – steep decline in the West
4. PC markets decline as smart devices continue to overtake – operating systems, SaaS, storage systems grow
5. Cloud Computing is still countervailing, but grows just 2% in 2013
6. Consumer spending drops by 4%; all business sectors drop – large company by less than SMB
7. Spending in Health and Education sectors grow – all others decline
8. The growth of MSPs And Cloud Services change distribution channels dramatically
9. Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems become key offerings
10. Corporate and Social Responsibility strategies address user and employee communities

It the time of year to make predictions and I’m afraid ITCandor holds out little cheer for the coming year. As we predicted in previous years the ITC industry has entered a period of downturn – shallower, but longer lasting than the Credit Crunch fall of 2008-9. We decided to call this the ‘Euro Crunch’, since the troubles are linked to the continuing problems of sovereign debt, austerity budgets and the resultant economic recession. As always we’ll take a broad-based view over the entire ITC market. See our About page for more details of our research process and taxonomy. You’ll be interested to read about the opportunities, no matter how few and far between they fall.

We’d like to thank Keith Humphreys of EuroLAN, Pim Bilderbeek and Marcel Warmerdam of the METISfiles, Mitul Metha of Tekplus, Roberto Masiero of the Innovation Group and Puni Raja of the Governance Board and others for their comments on our draft.

Some Conclusions – Best Of Luck In 2013

Overall will be fewer run-away successes in 2013 than in previous years – more ‘business as usual’. Despite the pessimism of our forecast, we don’t currently see any major disaster affecting the ITC market as there was in 2008. It is less likely that one of the EU countries will leave the Euro than it was this time last year – or even that such an event would cause a dramatic downturn in our business. Parts of the Middle East and Africa continue to experience social upheaval, which will limit the ability of vendors to unlock the good potential of under-developed markets.

On a vendor level we believe that HP and Microsoft will do better than in 2012 – the former due to its new focus on integrating its Enterprise offerings and the latter as a natural consequence of its new operating system introductions at the end of 2012. Apple will probably do worse than in 2012 simply because it will be hard for it to maintain its record-breaking growth of the last few years.

We wish you the best of luck in the coming year whatever your offerings, wherever you sell them and however you go to market. We’ll continue to do our best to measure, analyse and forecast the markets and look forward to helping you with your business planning and market exploitation needs going forwards.

Further Reading – See our self-assessment of our 2012 expectations see here
Navigate Our Expectations – overview 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10