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December 1, 2023
Last year, Digibee released our first annual predictions for 2023. If you want to see how I did, here’s what I predicted 12 months ago. I’m excited to repeat that exercise in this blog post, as 2024 promises to be an exciting year for our customers and us at Digibee.
Admittedly, my job is more about accuracy in business forecasting than reading the tea leaves to predict what might happen across the global economy over a year. But the signs last year were clear: there was much talk of an impending recession, and the news was full of large tech companies announcing waves of layoffs.
Despite the gloomy economic outlook, I predicted an increase in IT spending in 2023. My logic was straightforward. The lessons learned just a few years ago during the pandemic apply to a recession. Smart spending with an eye on the future will help your business survive short-term turmoil and be more dynamic when conditions improve. So strategic spending on techs enabling agility and scalability were (and are) key.
Today’s driving forces in the tech economy
Jump to today, and economic uncertainty remains, but that uncertainty looks different than it did a year ago. Talk of recession and layoffs have calmed down. Global geopolitical instability and the impending US presidential elections will undoubtedly impact the 2024 macro economy, as will what happens with inflation and the high-interest rates.
Of course, the elephant in the room for 2024 planning is Artificial Intelligence and, more specifically, Generative AI. All eyes are on this disruptor. And while the recent boardroom drama with OpenAI and Microsoft is newsworthy, the practical applications of AI will be the real news in the new year.
What might this all mean for IT buyers and technology investing? Let’s lean on what the experts are saying.
2024 outlook from leading industry analysts
In October, Gartner released its Worldwide IT Spending Forecast for 2024. In this annual report, Gartner forecasts an 8% growth in WW IT spending in the coming year. This is a significant increase over growth of 2.9% in 2022 and 3.5% in 2023.
What is (and what isn’t) driving the boost? Gartner mentions:
- “In 2023 and 2024, minimal IT spending will be tied to GenAI.”
- “Global spending on public cloud services is forecast to increase 20.4% in 2024, and similarly to 2023, the source of growth will be a combination of cloud vendor price increases and increased utilization.”
- “Cybersecurity spending is also driving growth … AI has created a new security scare for organizations.”
- “CIOs are experiencing change fatigue, often manifesting as a hesitation to invest in new projects and initiatives.”
So, tech spending is increasing more than in the past several years, but AI innovations aren’t the sole driving force. Some fundamentals need to be addressed first.
IDC released its Top 10 Worldwide IT Industry 2024 Predictions: Mastering AI Everywhere in November. Among the 10 predictions, this IDC FutureScape Report anticipates:
- “Prediction: Infrastructure Turbulence – The rate of AI spending for many enterprises will be constrained through 2025 due to major workload and resource shifts in corporate and cloud data centers.”
- “Prediction: IT Skills Mismatch – Inadequate training in AI, cloud, data, security, and emerging tech fields will directly and negatively impact enterprise attempts to succeed in efforts that rely on such technologies.”
- “Prediction: Unified Control – One of the most challenging tasks for IT teams in the next several years will be navigating the maturation of control platforms as they evolve from addressing a few basic systems to becoming a standard platform that orchestrates operations across infrastructure, data, AI services, and business applications/processes.”
Again, AI is at the center of the storm. Still, an underlying theme is the need to align the architecture of your infrastructure and your tech workforce’s skills to maximize the impact of AI in the long run.
The themes running through these 2024 forecasts
From my perspective, these outlooks suggest that IT and development teams need a foundational architecture that will adapt to change. Every organization adds tools, whether SaaS-based or traditional software. Every organization we speak with identifies the need to be prepared for change – either the reacting we all had to do during the pandemic or the proactive planning to capture AI’s potential. Scalability and agility are crucial. So, here’s my 2024 prediction.
Prediction: As spending continues to grow, pressure will mount on technology leaders to prove their investments are delivering both improved operational efficiency and measurable gains in innovation.
How does Digibee enable this change?
Many Digibee customers come to us because the integration platform or tooling they use creates roadblocks to achieving goals in development and innovation. Indeed, as you plan to incorporate AI into your products or infrastructure in the coming year(s), you can’t dedicate valuable talent to constantly writing code to support integration as your technologies change. As the above prediction from IDC suggests, IT skills and talent must evolve. The mundane tasks and sprawling complexity associated with legacy iPaaS or ESB need addressing.
The Digibee Integration Platform helps in several ways. Our iPaaS is purpose-built to enable all developers to build and maintain integrations in the platform, lessening the workload of specialized integration developers while chipping away at your development backlog. And Digibee is the only enterprise-grade iPaaS born in the cloud. What does that mean? It means scalability and reusability in integrations based on a platform architected for composability and containerized in Kubernetes.
How can Digibee positively impact your 2024?
Talk to us. Our conversation will start with a mutual discovery conversation and an overview of our work. If we can help your development team be more productive and help your organization be more agile, we will discover that together. Book your choice of a 15-minute discovery call, a 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive with our team, and see for yourself how Digibee can save you time, money, and resources and accelerate your crucial integration project.
