After a challenging year, IT professionals are wondering what 2010 will bring.   According to IDC study 2010 will experience an encouraging 3.2% growth with mobile devices and cloud computing being the strongest sectors.  "In last year's predictions, we talked about how a slow global economy would act like a pressure cooker on the IT market, speeding the development and adoption of new technologies and business models," IDC analyst Frank Gens stated. "What's different about 2010 is that the economic recovery will release some of the pressure on spending, enabling a number of transformational tipping points to be reached in a year of economic upswing."  The trend will continue toward mobile devices being popular not only for communications, but also for receiving data and information continues to challenge the PC as the primary internet device.    The iPhone app store is expected to have 300% growth with 300,000 apps by the end of next year and Android applications are expected to experience a 500% growth in 2010.     Smartphones, tablet products and other mobile devices with internet access will grow to approximately 1 billion next year.

The build out of “enterprise class” cloud computing service will continue to major growth area.   IDC stated "The emergence of enterprise-grade cloud services will be a unifying theme in this area, with a battle unfolding in cloud application platforms -- the most strategic real estate in the cloud for the next 20 years."  The overall growth in the IT industry for major categories of hardware, software and services are expected to have a 2 to 4% growth rate.    Emerging countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China are projected to have 2010 IT spending growth in the 8 to 13% range.

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