2023 IT trends: It’s all about smartphones, digital transformation, and cloud services

Worldwide shipments of PCs totalled 55.2 million units in the first quarter of 2023, down 30 percent from the first quarter of 2022, according to preliminary results from Gartner research. An unfavourable mix of oversupply and slow demand continues to affect the PC segment due to economic uncertainty and a lack of motivation to buy among consumers, resulting in the second consecutive quarter of historical year-over-year decline, after shipments in Q4 2022 went down 28 percent.

By Aurel Constantin

The historical decline in sales highlights a trend that seems unstoppable: the increasingly extensive use of smartphones to the detriment of PCs. The performance of phones continues to climb and nearly matches that of laptops, while business process applications are using smartphones as control devices. Almost all applications today allow—and even encour- age—the use of phones as control terminals, as they are much more easily accepted by non-IT people as well. Even identity verification is carried out using phones as a thirdparty control, thus making it safer for users to access applications, including on different access levels.

At the consumer level, there is no longer a question of user preference: the young gen- erations automatically use their phones to access any type of app, while those from the senior generations, who have not had time to get used to PCs, are learning about the digital world much more easily via smartphones. The phone has already become an integral part of daily life through the multitude of applications it offers, and it is going to become even more important as it allows us to integrate digital identity functionalities. Now we can also use our phones instead of bank cards or physical tickets; soon we will also be able to leave our IDs at home because we have them on our phones.

Smartphones and mobile communications have also allowed the rapid penetration of rural areas by the digital world. Online shopping is now possible via phone in any region with a 4G signal. And the phone doesn't even have to be a flagship model that costs over 1,000 euros. Even mid-range smartphones, which can be bought for a few hundred euros, are now equally capable of integrating apps for mobile banking, online shopping, and everything else.

“I personally believe that smartphones will continue to take over from PCs further human interactions with digital products and services. We already see that smartphones are becoming main access gates to digital identity. This is valid for both consumers and business interactions. What will persist will be use cases that can only be done using PCs/laptops, mainly in business, but also on residential markets, e.g. graphics, CAD, video editing, gaming, etc.,”says Radek Moc, Executive Partner at Gartner.

SMARTPHONE SALES ALSO DOWN—BUT NOT AS SHARPLY

Global smartphone sales fell by 13 percent in the first quarter of 2023, according to Canalys. Still, there were 269.8 million units delivered, five times the volume of PC shipments, thus giving us an overview of the difference between the two device categories. Even more, the demand decline for smartphones has started to flatten, although the contrast between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 is still stark. Samsung reclaimed its pole position and shipped 60.3 million units, driven by a refreshed product portfolio. Apple came in second with 58 million shipments and it was the only top five vendor to grow yearon-year, which gave it a strong 21 percent market share. Xiaomi defended its number three position with 30.5 million shipments, while OPPO and vivo completed the top five, shipping 26.6 million and 20.9 million units, securing market shares of 10 and 8 percent, respectively.

On the laptop market, Lenovo stayed in first position with 12.8 million units, even as it experienced a 30.2 percent decrease in sales compared to Q1 2022, while HP’s sales went down 24.2 percent to 12.02 million units, according to Gartner data. Dell remained in third place with 9.5 million units sold, a 30.9 percent decrease, and Apple came next with 4.8 million units, a decline of 34.2 percent. Asus sales fell 30 percent to 3.9 million units, while Acer went down 36.3 percent to 3.5 million units. These six brands make up a market share of almost 85 percent, while all other brands had combined sales of 8.5 million units—down 30.6 percent compared to Q1 2022.

Priorities For Cios

An event organised by Gartner in Bucharest in late April discussed the priorities of IT directors in the CEE region and the key trends and forecasts for 2023. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), distributed cloud, and MLOps are the top technologies likely to be implemented by CEE companies by 2025. Regardless of their actual digital ambitions, CEE CIOs and technology leaders see cybersecurity and information security as a top investment area for 2023, as 74 percent of CIOs are expected to increase funding in this area in 2023 compared to 2022. This also represents a 28 percent increase from a year ago.

All the services above are supported by the cloud. Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7 percent to a total of USD 597.3 billion in 2023, up from USD 491 billion in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. Cloud computing is driving the next phase of digital business, as organisations pursue disruption through emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI), web3, and the metaverse.

“Hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda,” said Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, in a press release. “Organisations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up. For example, generative AI is supported by large language models (LLMs), which require powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real time. Cloud offers the perfect solution and platform. It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-asa-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9 percent, followed by platform-as-aservice (PaaS) at 24.1 percent.

GARTNER DES: MEASURING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

One of the common challenges for CIOs, IT, technology, and business leaders is measuring the progress and success of digital transformation. Gartner Executive Partners Václav

Spana and Radek Moc introduced the Digital Execution Scorecard (DES), a comprehensive set of digital strategy benchmarks assembled by Gartner analysts to accelerate decisionmaking, drive execution, and help CIOs and other leaders prioritise investments in digital capabilities and focus on the most important objectives. "DES helps organisations track the progress of digital strategy execution using digital key performance indicators (KPIs). It is not a maturity model. KPIs are benchmarked against industry competitors to generate objective benchmark reports that show strengths and relative weaknesses in different areas of digital execution based on comparisons of ambition and performance among competitors," Radek Moc explained. Digital ambitions can face various business, political, and technological risks, and these are changing rapidly in 2023. While respondents to the Gartner Emerging Risks Survey in the fourth quarter of 2022 cited the escalation of conflict in Europe, major material shortages, and expectations of stagnant inflation as the three most important risks (followed by critical infrastructure failure and financial planning uncertainty), a similar survey in the first quarter of 2023 found that the top three risks are evolving socio-political expectations, third-party viability, and critical infrastructure failure. "Business leaders should work with scenario analysis, planning, and modelling to be prepared for different possible outcomes—we offer tools such as the sector-specific emerging risk dashboard for this purpose," Vaclav Spana added.