IDC releases its IT industry predictions for 2021 and beyond

Today, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced its predictions for the worldwide IT industry. Shaped by the ongoing economic disruption caused by the global pandemic, the predictions reveal what IDC expects to happen in the next 12-24 months and beyond as enterprises and the IT Industry strive to succeed.

The next five years are crucial for CIOs and digitally driven C-suites, IDC says. To accelerate digitalization, CIOs must remedy shortcomings in IT environments established during the initial emergency response, identify the organization's IT transformation trends and use new technologies to capitalize on competitive and industry disruptions.

IDC also stated in its report that despite COVID-19’s widespread impact on businesses, the global economy will sustain its “digital destiny” course: the digitization of 65% of global GDP by 2022. This will drive $6.8 trillion in IT spending from 2020 through 2023.

"The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/foreseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy," said IDC group vice president for worldwide research, Rick Villars. "A large percentage of a future enterprise's revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data resources."

More key forecasts from the report include the following:

1. The shift to cloud-centric infrastructure will accelerate twice as fast as it did before the pandemic.

2. Edge will become a top priority, spurring adoption of new, cloud-centric edge and network solutions that’ll enable faster responses to current business needs while promoting long-term digital resilience.

3. Seventy-five percent of G2000 companies will commit to providing technical parity to a workforce that is hybrid workforce by design rather than by circumstance, enabling them to work together separately and in real-time.

4. Smart CIOs will look for opportunities to design next-generation digital platforms that modernize and rationalize infrastructure and applications while delivering flexible capabilities to create and deliver new products, services and experiences to workers and customers.

5. Leading enterprises must rapidly adapt to business disruptions, leverage digital capabilities to maintain continuous business operations and quickly adjust to take advantage of changed conditions for competitive advantage.

6. By 2023, an emerging cloud ecosystem for extending resource control and real-time analytics will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere.

7. By 2023, driven by the goal to embed intelligence in products and services, one-quarter of G2000 companies will acquire at least one AI software startup to ensure ownership of differentiated skills and IP.

8. By 2024, 80% of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and autonomous IT operations.

9. By 2025, 90% of G2000 companies will mandate reusable materials into IT hardware supply chains, carbon neutrality targets for providers' facilities and lower energy use as prerequisites for doing business.

10. Through 2023, half of the enterprises' hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in providing IT, security and DevOps teams with the right tools or skills.

You can find the report and an on-demand replay of IDC's Worldwide IT Industry Predictions webinar at: https://www.idc.com/events/futurescape.