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9 Tech Trends That Will Make Someone Billions Of Dollars Next Year
2013 will soon be upon us.
Most of us can see that 2012's four big trends will get bigger next year: mobile, social, cloud, and big data.
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Market-research company IDC has gone one further, predicting how these trends will unfold next year—to the tune of billions of dollars.
Companies are ready to upgrade to all the latest new tech. And consumers are opening up their wallets for smartphones, tablets and apps.
All told, IT spending will be up almost 6%.
The need for tech in overseas emerging markets will really kick into gear.
Geographic areas like Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East will spend $730 billion on IT, up almost 9%. One-third of the customers that IT vendors have will come from these areas.
When it come to mobile, 2013 will bring us these three things:
- Mini tablets with screens less than 8 inches in size will be the rage, accounting for 60% of tablets sold.
- The market for smartphones and tablets combined will grow by 20%.
- 2013 will be a make-or-break year for mobile platforms. Those that don't attract interest from at least 50% of app developers won't survive. Google and Apple are past that threshold. Microsoft now sits at 33%. RIM is at 9%.
The software-as-a-service phenomenon really grew up in the past 12 months, with big vendors like Oracle and SAP spending billions to buy their way into the market.
IDC thinks we haven't seen anything yet.
"There will be over $25 billion in SaaS acquisitions over the next 20 months, up from $17 billion in the past 20 months," it says.
Some companies are too highly valued to make for easy acquisitions, like the publicly traded Salesforce.com, worth $22 billion, or the fast-growing, still-private Box at $1.2 billion. But a bunch of others could be ripe for deals: Okta, Zenoss, and ServiceMax come to mind.
In 2012, a lot of new cloud tech came out that made it easier and more affordable for anyone to build a cloud.
That means that in 2013, a whole bunch of new clouds will crop up. These will serve specific industries, for instance hospitals, construction companies, banks.
People who don't work as IT professionals have taken over the job of buying tech for the company: their own mobile devices, file-sharing clouds, and social apps.
Some people call this the Dropbox effect. Companies like Box, Asana, and Yammer built their business models on it.
IDC says that in 2013, that business model will pay off and non-IT business managers will buy 80% of new tech directly for their teams.
Just like 2012 was the year that mobile devices and cloud computing became the must-have things for every company, big data will be the thing everyone will use in 2013.
IDC says the big-data market will grow at an annual rate of 40%. It will hit about $5 billion in 2012, $10 billion by 2013, and $53 billion by 2017.
New data-center technologies that took root in 2012 will become the big thing in 2013.
These include "converged systems," where companies buy machines that have computation, storage, networking, and software bundled together.
Another is software-defined networks, which is a new way to build networks.
These represent a tremendous opportunity for the established players like Cisco, Dell, HP, and Oracle. But they are also a big risk if they get it wrong. A whole class of startups are rising up to disrupt these guys.
The bring-your-own-device trend, also known as BYOD, will morph into BYID—bring-your-own-ID.
That is, your work computer will be available to you anywhere, on any device. All you have to do is properly log in.
This is the ultimate result of investments in new cloud, mobile, and data-center technologies.
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