More services are moving online. You can go to school, order a cab, plan a trip, and get food without ever leaving your computer. And unless you’ve been in a coma since the mid-80s, this should not be news to you—online services have been creeping into our daily lives for years.
But we wanted to take a peek at where the money is going in the world of online services. So Technavio broke the market down into six key segments: E-grocers, MOOCs, food delivery, cab aggregators, infotainment, and online travel agents.
We looked at the money spent by end-users on IT services from vendors like HP, Oracle, Cisco and IBM, and found that, kind of unsurprisingly, travel and groceries were overwhelmingly the top segments. This makes sense since both of these segments have been very active online for ages (when was the last time you went to a physical travel agent?), while other segments like MOOCs and cab aggregators are much newer.
Global IT spending by online services and application market by end-user 2015
Source: Technavio
All told, global IT spending on online services and applications was valued at $9.23 billion in 2015, and it will reach $23 billion by 2020, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20% over the projected period.
This five years period, from 2015 to 2020, will be significant for the market. Many businesses with an existing online platform are going a step further, and developing apps to get their services directly into the hands of consumers. Mobile wallets are also coming of age and developers are integrating them with all these new apps to make on-the-go payments that much easier. Just think of how disruptive Uber was for the cab industry—that’s the direction we’re heading for a lot of online services over the next few years. And as market vendors step up their products, online services and applications stand to get a whole lot better over the projected period.
