This week I attended the Annual Directions Conference  held by research firm IDC. Because of the coronavirus, the conference was held online. Here are some of the key messages – a deeper analysis is provided by Michael J. Miller, chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments and can be found Here.

IT GROWTH: IDC President Crawford Del Prete expects IT growth in 2020 in the 2.5 to 3 percent range, a couple points lower than expectations prior to the virus outbreak

DIGITAL ECONOMY: IDC sees the digital economy moving from conceptual to aspirational and operational. The visual they used describes what is changing.

BIG TRENDS: In what they called the fast five of the digital economy, IDC identified the big trends described in the visual below.

PREDICTION: By 2023, IDC predicts that 52 percent of global GDP will be driven by “digitally transformed” enterprises; and that by 2024, 51 percent of IT budgets will be for digital innovation and transformation.

PREDICTION: In 2021, Chief Analyst Frank Gens predicts there will be 38 billion connected “things” and said the 39,000 core data centers are both too few and too far away to support all of these. He is predicting a big growth in a distributed tier of “cloud systems” at the edge and near-edge—things like bank branch offices, hotels, and retail sites.

PREDICTION: By 2022, IDC expects 70 percent of enterprises will deploy hybrid/multi-cloud management across their digital infrastructure, and that by 2023 over half of new infrastructure will be deployed at the edge (including all sites outside of corporate data centers), compared with just 10 percent last year.

AGILITY: Gens said enterprises were increasingly using agile and DevOps methods of creating and managing software, more modular software, and democratizing development. As a result, IDC expects 60 percent of enterprises will deploy code to production at least once a day by 2025. Last year, it was only 3 percent. As a result, he said IDC predicts that over 520 million new apps and services will be developed and deployed in support of the digital economy by 2024.

Additional insight from the session is provided in the Deeper Analysis I referenced above. The other speakers included: IDC Chief Research Officer Meredith Whalen who noted that 50 percent of technology spending now comes from outside the IT department; IDC Program Vice President for Customer Experience Alan Webber, who pushed the idea of the empathetic enterprise; IDC Program Vice President, Security & Trust Frank Dickson pushed for the concept of pervasive integrity; and IDC Group Vice President for Analytics and Information Management Dan Vesse, who spoke about a company’s need to rethink what it means to have enterprise analytics.