Today’s IT Market is a Zero Sum Game

For all Big Data hype, bubbling startup world of San Francisco and huge valuations of unicorns there is virtually no growth of the IT market as a whole. Infrastructure behemoths such as Intel, Ibm and Cisco have not seen growth of revenues for a few good years. What is going on? Today’s IT market is a zero sum game, with a lot of internal dynamics, but still a zero sum game of shifting investment priorities. Funds flow from traditional data center configuration to highly converged cloud infrastructure, ultimately shaping new IT fabric of interwoven criss-crossed API-powered applications. The new rules of the game are integration, interoperability, going mobile and real time analytics.

VC boom of the last years did not result in revenue growth for the market as whole. In reality venture capital funds R&D outsourcing – startups develop new technologies, IT behemoths buy startups to integrate new technologies into their product/service offers, shortening their own R&D cycle and time-to-market.

So, where are the money in the market? Currently the US technology lead over Europe and Asia is 3-5 years. Eventually European and Asian economies will start to catch up. Recession is still here and now, companies, both small and large, are reluctant to cash out new technology unless it’s an absolute necessity. Yet, on a brighter side, we see more operational funds flowing into cloud-based services, often without any co-ordination with IT departments/budgets. Governments all over the world are golden opportunity with late adoption/deployment cycle. One of the largest IT enterprises in the world, the US Government IT, lost its innovation steam among policy zigzagging, budget cuts and lack of competent IT workforce, yet elections are close and many things can change with a new White House administration.