Top Trends 2021 - InBrief Analysis - Worldwide

The year 2020 is coming to an end, and it was clearly marked by the Covid-19 health crisis and the resulting massive economic crisis. On the IT market, however, we have observed a highly differentiated situation in terms of products and segments, industries, topics, and countries. For example, while the consulting and contract staff markets have substantially decreased, cloud-related services have all but maintained their pre-crisis growth dynamics. On the one hand, the crisis has created huge pressure on costs in many industries; on the other, it has led many companies to accelerate their digital transformation.

The growth topics have more or less remained the same. The strongest drivers of growth and change are cloud transformation as well as analytics, AI (artificial intelligence), and automation, supported by agile and DevOps models. These levers are the key enablers of the digital transformation taking place mainly in three areas: front-end processes and customer experience (CX, where transformation started), back-office and front-/back-office integration, and industrial IT/ OT/ IoT. Security remains a major issue, with increasingly numerous and diverse challenges. Both vendors and customers have difficulty finding skills, especially in topics such as cloud, security, AI, IoT, and CX. The skills shortage leads to rising, or at least stable, rates. Finally, raising operational efficiency is always part of the equation. While the past few years (2014-2018) were marked by an excellent economic environment, we already saw a slight slowdown in selected industries and countries in 2019. The current situation has dramatically reinforced the importance of this topic.