New research from IDC indicates the growth of new technologies, including the Internet of things (IOT), robotics, augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), will drive the next wave of growth in the global ICT sector, increasing market opportunities to $5.5 trillion by 2020.
The report, IDC Worldwide Black Book: 3rd Platform Edition, is a compilation of quarterly analysis of the status and projected growth of the worldwide ICT industry in 54 countries, including South Africa.
According to the report, new technologies, which are referred to as "innovation accelerators", will provide $7.4 trillion in collective industry revenue from 2015-2020.
The report states a large proportion of this spending will come from the fast-growing IOT market, which is forecast to reach almost $1.3 trillion in annual revenue by 2020.
"More than $1 trillion represents new opportunity outside of traditional technology market categories (devices, infrastructure, software, services, and telecom). Robotics, AR/VR, security, cognitive/artificial intelligence, and 3D printing will contribute the rest of this fast-growing portion of the ICT market," explains Stephen Minton, programme vice-president, Customer Insights & Analysis at IDC.
The report further forecasts ICT spending will increase by 5% over the same period. "In total, the innovation accelerators will post a CAGR of 18%. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) represents the largest market for the accelerators, forecast to reach more than $600 billion by 2020, followed closely by the US. The fastest growth over the same period will, however, be in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa."
Similarly, the most recent Frost & Sullivan analysis: ICT Enterprise Spend in Retail, South Africa, forecast to 2019 indicated SA's retail sector level of investment in ICT will reach R6.11 billion by 2019.
The report shows key services that will shape the IT strategy across retailers are cloud-based services as a measure to increase work effectiveness; workforce mobile solutions to increase efficiency across key working groups along the value chain and ensure real-time communication; and retail analytics focused on developing strategies and plans that aid in mitigating stock outage and stock layout challenges while enabling track routing systems and store optimisations.
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