analytics

Forrester: $2.1 Trillion Will Go Into IT Spend In 2013; Apps Lead The Charge

 Software is eating the world. Forrester’s big-picture look at spending puts software as the biggest general category for investments, at $542 million for 2013. “Software is where most of the big changes in technology are taking place,” writes Bartels. That is to say, while legacy, on-premise investments are “languishing,” those that focus on cloud-based implementations such as SaaS; and “smart computing” in the form of big data analytics and mobile apps are booming — following trends we’ve seen for a while now. Overall, software investments are set to grow 3.3% this year and 6.2% in 2014 — growth rates that he concedes “may not seem impressive [but still] stronger than any other tech category.” A full breakdown of software spend is at the bottom of this post.
forrester IT spend 2013
Tablets — and Apple — continue to lead the charge in hardware. If you look at the IT spending wheel above, it’s clear that PCs are the single-biggest category for computer equipment, at $134.2 million in 2013. But in fact PCs are a shrinking market. Traditional PCs, Bartels writes, will see “just a 3% rise, despite the launch of Windows 8 operating system.” So what’s growing? Tablets, and specifically the iPad. Forrester projects that sales of tablets to business and government will go up by 36% this year to $21 billion. Again, the big winner here continues to be Apple, taking $14 billion of that this year. Samsung Galaxy and the Surface from Microsoft are “helping to expand the tablet market, without putting much of a dent in the growth of the Apple iPad so far.”
Similarly, Apple, as well as Linux, continue to grow in the traditional PC category against Windows-powered machines, while the rest of the picture is relatively discouraging. There will be $135 billion spent on PCs in 2014, a rise of only $1 billion on 2013, with Windows-based devices down by $7 billion, and Apple Macs and tablets rising by $6 billion. “Elsewhere in the hardware market, spending on storage hardware will be flat, purchases of servers will decline by 1%, and sales of computer peripherals will fall by 3%,” Bartels writes. Indeed, earlier this year Forrester predicted that Apple would sell some $39 billion in hardware over the next two years.