Mobile and Cloud Developments are expected to dominate in 2013 due to the transition of IT industry into to the 3rd Platform, according to a new report from IDC.

IDC’s new report reveals that global IT spending in 2013 is expected to rise 5.7% to $2.1 trillion, which will be mainly driven by smart mobile devices that are anticipated to rise 20%, while generating about 57% of the industry’s overall growth.

Apart from mobile devices, the IT industry is expected to report a rise of about 2.9%, the report said.

During the period, global software and services spending are projected to grow 6% and 4%, respectively while the PC and server markets to return to modest positive growth.

IDC senior vice president and chief analyst said Frank Gens said that the overall IT industry is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90% of all the growth in the IT market.

"Companies that are not putting 80% or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP," Gens said.

Emerging markets are forecasted to report a rise of 8.8% in IT spending in 2013 to about $730bn, with China capturing the highest spending of all the BRIC countries that include Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Mini tablets segment is anticipated to account for about 60% of the 170million tablets shipped in 2013, IDC said.

Cloud is expected to witness over $25bn in merger & acquisition (M&A) activity over the next 20 months due to rise in packaged application providers like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle that offer their own software as a service (SaaS), while public platform as a service is also expected to boost in 2013.

In 2013, about 60% of new IT investments are expected to directly involve line of business (LoB) executives which may result in businesses to spend about $65bn on industry-specific solutions, which is expected to grow to about $100bn in the next 3 years.

The rise in use of mobile devices and apps and the transition toward SaaS and industry PaaS will steer changes in datacentres and IT organisations supporting 3rd Platform solutions.

In the social software market, enterprise software vendors are expected to continually step up their app transformations with social technology acquisitions, speeding the acquisition fling that began in 2011.

Bring Your Own Identity (BYOID) is expected to add consumerisation to enterprise security in 2013 due to the use of Facebook,Google, and other social and consumer cloud identity services by the security software vendors and IT shops as major part of identity management environment.

Big data is also expected to rise due to the rise in investment in technologies and services to about $10bn in 2013.