Economic uncertainty surrounding the U.S. government sequester, European debt crisis and weakening GDP in China has resulted in volatile spending patterns across most segments of the market. According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), as a result of the current economic climate, business technology spending was slightly below expectations in the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013.

IDC now projects worldwide IT spending growth of 4.9 percent this year in constant currency, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 percent growth — and representing a slowdown from the 5.6 percent growth recorded in 2012. As a result, IT spending will reach $2.06 trillion in 2013. Including telecom services, ICT spending will increase by 4.5 percent to $3.7 trillion.

So, what are the key trends that are shaping the updated global forecasts?

Deteriorating PC Shipments

The reduction in IDC’s overall forecast for 2013 is largely driven by rapidly deteriorating PC shipments since the second half of 2012. IDC now expects PC spending to decline by 3 percent in constant currency this year, representing a third successive year of declining PC revenues.

The shift to mobile devices remains a key driver for overall tech spending growth. Excluding mobile phones and tablets, worldwide IT spending increased by only 2.8 percent in 2012 and is forecast to grow by just 2.6 percent this year.

Worldwide spending on smartphones will increase by 17 percent in 2013 while tablet spending will grow by 32 percent. The combined growth rate for PCs and tablets, meanwhile, will remain stable in the range of 4-5 percent.

Cloud Services Cannibalizes Software and IT Services

Just as tablets are cannibalizing PC spending, so the growth of managed cloud services continues to cannibalize commercial software and IT services. Software spending in the U.S. grew slightly slower than forecast in 2012, and IDC has consequently reduced the U.S. software forecast to 6 percent growth for 2013 (from 7 percent).

IT services demand remains stable, but the pass-through from capital spending and software deployment remains tepid by historical standards. IDC now forecasts growth of 5.6 percent in worldwide software spending in 2013 (constant currency), and 3.8 percent in IT services.

Decline in Server Revenues

IDC’s assessment also suggests a decline in overall server revenues while storage infrastructure spending will cool somewhat after the major spending cycle of 2011/2012. IDC now projects 2.4 percent growth in worldwide storage hardware revenues this year, down from 6.1 percent growth in 2012.

Network infrastructure investment was strong in 2012, as many carriers invested in the deployment of LTE networks, but this will also cool in 2013. Service provider spending on network equipment will increase by 1.1 percent this year, compared to 5.8 percent in 2012. Enterprise network spending should remain more stable, projected to post growth of 6.8 percent.

The Global Networked Economy

Emerging markets are still the engines of growth for Worldwide IT spending, with strong trends continuing in markets such as India and Brazil in recent months. The weakest-performing geographies will be Western Europe and Japan, where slow economic growth is inhibiting IT spending while the U.S. market remains fragile in the context of political uncertainty.

«It’s all about the economy,» said Stephen Minton, Vice President at IDC. «Our surveys confirm that underlying demand for IT products and services remains strong, but that businesses are once again being forced to delay new projects or investments in the face of longer decision-making cycles and a lack of short-term visibility. This storm could pass quickly, if governments in the U.S., Europe, China and Japan succeed in steering their ships towards calm waters in the second half of the year.»

That being said, it’s the savvy forward-looking executive leaders who continue to invest heavily in business technology adoption. They see a window of opportunity to deploy productivity-enhancing applications and thereby make a quantum leap ahead of their conservative competitors that lack the strategic foresight to act boldly. This is the fundamental reason why ICT spending will reach significant levels in 2013.

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I’ve written before about an ongoing software development project with which I’ve been recently involved. Its complexities continue to challenge a development team with architects, programmers, and project managers in Chicago, Silicon Valley, and the Philippines.

But we’re able to keep one aspect of this project simple, thanks to a cloud-based, Visual PaaS solution from Orangescape that runs on the Google Apps Engine (GAE). The program is called KISSFLOW – the “kiss” here plays off a familiar expression and means “Keep it Simple and Smart.”

KISSFLOW has been invaluable so far in allowing us to bring clarity and simplicity to a previously convoluted way of doing things.

As a consultant for the project, I’m tasked with analyzing the current workflow of an existing small business and, for lack of a better word, fixing it. Existing processes involved numerous people, scads of paper forms, compliance with local, state and federal agencies, and a workflow that often doubled and tripled back on itself.

KISSFLOW cuts through this fog and is allowing us to visualize and streamline existing processes, conceive new ones, and implement a new workflow.

I, Citizen Developer
Although I’ve had exposure to several programming languages and approaches over the past 25 years, I am not a professional programmer. Orangescape’s KISSFLOW allows me the freedom of being a “citizen developer” (ie, a business-side developer) while giving our team a simple way to hew and bring forth what we have in mind.

Down the road, we’re aware that Orangescape provides a path to Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and private clouds, should we move in any of those directions. This is critical, as we plan to keep developing our workflow solution until it not only works for us, but can be a viable product that will integrate with MySQL and be sold to small businesses everywhere.
For those who think cloud technology hurts job creation, the opposite has been true in our case. Even though we’re still in the early stages, our development so far has allowed two part-time partners in the firm to finally retire – they now have confidence that the business can run without them – while creating several new positions that are allowing the company to grow at a fast clip so far this year.
The company’s CEO has been planning to expand into new locations for some time. He is now able to do this with the firm’s much-improved workflow.

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Economic uncertainty surrounding the U.S. government sequester, European debt crisis and weakening GDP in China has resulted in volatile spending patterns across most segments of the market.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), as a result of the current economic climate, business technology spending was slightly below expectations in the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013.

IDC now projects worldwide IT spending growth of 4.9 percent this year in constant currency, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 percent growth — and representing a slowdown from the 5.6 percent growth recorded in 2012. As a result, IT spending will reach $2.06 trillion in 2013. Including telecom services, ICT spending will increase by 4.5 percent to $3.7 trillion.

So, what are the key trends that are shaping the updated global forecasts?

Deteriorating PC shipments

The reduction in …

A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting.

The train of thought here, of course, has to wonder what those expectations were, especially in a week where service level agreements (SLAs) are at the forefront following 100% SLA provider Mimecast’s outage.

Yet for companies experienced with cloud, the report notes that more sophisticated systems are being demanded, such as end-to-end automation, more flexible service-level management and – the big one – the ability to flip between CSPs.

The report defines ‘experience’ pretty highly, as should be expected for ushering in cloud’s maturation: four years and a minimum of three platforms utilised.

Unsurprisingly, software as a service (SaaS) is still the most popular platform, utilised by 68% in EMEA and 94% in the US. However, across the EMEA region, platform as …

Enterprises see a lot of promise in mobile devices. Their users should be more productive now that they can craft presentations on the go. Their employees should have more opportunities to collaborate now that they can share documents anytime via their smartphones. Right?

Well, not really. For too many businesses, the promise of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend has been swallowed up by mobile workflow challenges and insecure, consumer-grade cloud sharing solutions.

It would be easy to predict the break-up of mobility and the cloud, but this is a relationship worth saving. Doing so, however, will take a new approach.

A mobile workflow reliant on the Pandora’s Box of file sharing

Left to fend for themselves, business users have cobbled together their own clunky workarounds to mobility-cloud problems. For example, in order to share, annotate, edit and collaborate over Microsoft Office files from their mobile devices, enterprise users have had …

Ariba Vice President Chris Haydon explains the company’s latest news and offers insights into how Ariba will be broadening its services procurement management value, mobile push, and AribaPay rollout.
We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near-term to Ariba in a couple of areas. First, let’s talk about Network RFQ or the Spot Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group, 40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.
By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we’re going to be able to address a large pain-point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-term solution that we announced at LIVE, and we’re bringing that forward over the next six months.

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LogMeIn is announcing a solution for the “Bring Your Own Apps” trend. Importantly, rather than making IT professionals the bad guys trying to stop the trend, the new AppGuru puts IT pros back into the role of strategic advisor in a cloud-centric world.
As business applications move to the cloud and new, employee-introduced cloud apps take hold in the workplace, the nature of and need for identity management is changing. A December 2012 study conducted by Edge Strategies on the bring-your-own-app (BYOA) trend found nearly 70% of companies reported active use of employee-introduced cloud apps at work. According to the findings, only 22 percent of IT pros indicate they are fully prepared to handle BYOA and 43 percent are concerned with the lack of control over these apps. In addition, SaaS enterprise apps (e.g., Salesforce.com), are often controlled by line-of-business owners, thus putting traditional IT tasks such as provisioning and policy control in the hands of business users outside the IT department.

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If the leadership in your organization is mature and has a good track record – rest assured that a risk-mitigated decision to dabble in the public cloud is a vote of confidence in your direction.
It’s little more than innate human nature to strive to control the environment around us. From macro-level examples, including the very democratic foundation of our governments, to things we do every day; our desire to control is evident in all aspects of our lives. Have you ever lined up in the automated check-out line at the grocery store even though a «manned» (gasp!) cashier was available? You’re not alone.

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Many have heard of OAuth but are unsure of how it might apply to their business.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, will describe how OAuth can be used to facilitate certain business models and simplify the sharing of private data.
Alistair Farquharson is a visionary industry veteran focused on using disruptive technologies to drive business growth and improve efficiency and agility within organizations. As the CTO of SOA Software Alistair is helping to shape and mature the enterprise API and SOA industry. Alistair is responsible for product strategy and development for this leading Enterprise API and SOA Governance company. He spends a great deal of time and energy shaping customer and industry direction with regular conference keynote appearances, discussions with customers, and even the occasional foray into writing code. Alistair has been at the forefront of many technology waves from enterprise web architecture, through web services and SOA, and now into APIs. His expertise spans a wide range of technologies and businesses, and he brings a unique global focus to everything he does.

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