There are some pretty clear signs of the shape of things to come – if you look at where the investment is going right now.
It’s always been hard to work out where the money goes in tech, where the countless billions spent on technology actually go, where it actually ends up. Part of that is because IT spending is often literally hidden away. Once upon a time it used to be hidden away in the form of the servers in the mysterious basement or in the datacenter which few of us would ever visit. Companies are less likely to hold onto their own tech hardware now, but the IT spend is still hidden away. Much of it is spent on cloud computing, which really means it’s instead hidden away in other people’s datacenters which even fewer of us will ever visit. For all this, most execs have come to understand the power and importance of technology in the last 18 months. That’s because it played a big role in making it possible for the vast majority of office-based staff to rapidly switch to working from home, and it also helped organisations rethink their business processes or even business models so that they could continue to operate during the pandemic.
