Welcome to the new year of 2011. This time of the year is usually the point for many companies to leave the past behind in order to enthusiastically engage in new, promising projects or to even renew outdated business practices and strategies. Orienting on the future for a new start, however, also means to look back and reflect of past years’ major developments and trends. This article reviews the current status quo of the global IT industry and outlines the recently upcoming major players, innovations and developments one still has to count on in 2011.

The first decade of the twenty first century was marked by an ongoing global recession that peaked in the financial and economic crisis. As hard as this crisis hit economies worldwide, innovative ICTs remained to be a key driver of growth.  Companies that were forced to optimize their processes in order to survive on the rough and highly competitive market often turned to the IT sector in order to find better, more effective solutions. Especially IT outsourcing locations such as China and India emerged as major players on the IT market, over the past two decades.

Concerning global technological advancement and infrastructure, rankings of 2009-10 reveal that Sweden is the most networked economy in the world, followed by Singapore, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. Generally Nordic countries are highly competitive regarding their ICT use and strategy. Europe stays to be one of the most networked regions of the world. The digital divide becomes more and more apparent if such densely networked regions are compared to large parts of Africa and South America.

The companies that should be regarded as the most aspiring, uprising players in the ICT industry are social networking and Web 2.0 companies. Despite the fact that it still represents a cost-free social networking platform, Mark Zuckerberg’s online empire Facebook turned into a major enterprise on the market and even served as foundation for a Hollywood blockbuster. Regarding the newest technology solutions and software developments, the Smartphone represents one of the hot, booming developments that already became mainstream. Business phones, multiple apps, web n’ walk etc are only a few buzzwords. Furthermore, Google as well as Apple enriched the IT world with numerous innovative applications. Did you know that as much as 100.000 iPhone applications are offered solely on the iPhone platform?

Having performed astonishingly well in a global state of crisis, the IT sector will continue to be on the list as a major global business sector. With huge potential to continuously produce innovative, possibly even revolutionary, technological developments, the ICT industry already bears companies that managed to become major players in terms of global market capitalization. Apple, IBM and Microsoft are already followed by numerous emerging competitors who are as inspired by the growth of their sector. Are you ready to jump on that bandwagon?

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