Follows five years of economic crisis 
The national ITC market in Portugal is expected to grow 0.9% to €3.46bn after the market reversed a negative trend from previous years and increased by 1.3% y/y last year, according to the study by the ITC market consultancy IDC.
Also, the predictions indicate a continued growth in the coming years: in 2016 the Portuguese ICT market is forecast to go up by 1.7% with a further growth by 1.9% and 2.2%, in 2017 and 2018, respectively, according to IDC’s forecast “Portugal in the Digital Transformation of Turning Point”. The driving forces behind the growth are built on four pillars, as it says, and these include mobility, cloud services, social technologies and Big Data. Additionally, the companies may benefit from tapping into market opportunities such as supporting the internationalisation processes, improvement of the operational efficiencies, products and services innovations and adaptability to the changing market conditions.
At the same time, IDC warns that despite the fact that a domestic ICT market in Portugal left the negative territory after five years of crisis and the growth is now expected to continue across the majority of sectors, the telecommunications services market is still expected to fall by 2.8%.
As a demand for cloud computing services will carry on, the market itself has significantly changed. We can see more consistent and systematic implementation of the services that support the internationalisation initiatives against the abundance of ad hoc projects that characterised the market in the previous years.
In 2015, Portugal will also see a growing trend in mobile technologies and solutions which are expected to register a higher growth in terms of the ITC spending. Big Data and Analytics will stay on the agenda of Portuguese managers this year, with more companies adopting the BDA technologies to improve their business performance and relationships with customers. Also, the data storage market is set to continue its growth and benefit from this new situation.
What is more, IDC says that the security is expected to make a comeback to the agenda but rather towards the end of the year. Even though it is not an issue for now at the national organisations, the safety expenditures are expected to go up in 2015 with more companies adopting a new security paradigm that focuses rather on data security at the expense of safety of the hardware.
Internet of Things (IoT) will also play a key role in the coming years and according to IDC’s estimates there will be 68.1 million devices in use and connected to the internet in Portugal by 2020. This means that the adoption of IoT strategies will enable national organisations to accelerate the digital transformation of its processes and initiatives, it says.
The internationalisation strategies adapted by the Portuguese companies will greatly help facilitate the IT spending in 2015 and a growing role of the relationships with customers will translate into the expansion of CRM applications and new projects including cloud computing services, analytics processes as well as mobility and social networks.
Also, the Portuguese ICT market and organisations are expected to benefit from new technologies and will start adoption process technologies of the 3rd Platform and implementation of the IT-as-a-Service, according to IDC’s study.
Finally, IDC expects that by 2020 all the economic sectors will be led by companies with a strong presence in the digital economy. And in Portugal this trend is expected to begin this year.