The UK ICT Market

The UK offers companies one of the largest ICT markets in Europe with the largest consumer expenditure per head and an overall spend of £140 billion per annum of which the UK public sector contributes £18 billion.

The UK is a strong market for new technology and design with a sophisticated consumer base. UK consumers are early adopters of new technologies and design making the UK market an excellent ‘test bed’ for ICT companies.

The UK also has the strongest ICT skills in Europe and the highest number of ICT graduates in the whole of Western Europe. In Addition the UK has flexible labour laws that ensure direct and contract staff can be employed under fair terms that will allow flexibility as your business develops.

On this page you can find further details about the UK software and IT industries, the cyber security market, Cloud services, Data centres and Mobile applications.

Software & IT

The UK’is Europe’s leading market for software and IT services with a market value of £58 billion pa. Independent research by Microsoft has indicated that the market could drive the creation of 2,500 new businesses and 78,200 new jobs by 2013.

The UK’s success is built on several key strengths.

The UK is a powerhouse for software development attracting £930 million pa software R&D investment from international businesses.

In addition the UK is home to over 100,000 specialist software companies and all the major global software companies such as Microsoft, IBM and HP have sizeable operations here.

Cyber Security

The UK offers opportunities in a vast number of areas under the broad cyber security heading including: authentication, authorisation, trust, identity management, cryptography, cryptanalysis, computer security (largely defence against malware), human aspects of security, privacy, information hiding, anonymity, digital rights management and watermarking.

The true cost of Cyber Crime is hard to measure however a number of recent studies have suggested the total equivalent cost to the UK economy could be as high as £26.9bn a year with by far the largest proportion of the cost bourn by industry. The UK cyber security market is currently worth around £2.8 billion and increased general awareness of the cyber threats, as well as other areas such as the continuing evolution of connected services, will continue to drive growth in this market. Mobile phone security is expected to be one of the largest markets over the next 2/3 years as more and more people use their mobiles for M-Commerce, as well as the growth in popularity of BYOD to work.

Cloud Services

The UK Cloud Computing annual market value is predicted to grow from £2.4bn to £6.1bn by 2014. Currently 18% of UK SME business use cloud solutions but a further 30% plan implementations within the next year. By 2015 half of all new IT spending by the public sector is predicted to be on public cloud services.

Data Centres - The UK data centre market, is the largest in Western Europe and the growth in the amount of data and new services such as cloud computing is creating new sources of demand. Gartner predicts a rise in overall hosting and cloud services from £21.2bn in 2008 to £70 billion in 2013.portunity - By

Mobility – There is a big opportunity for enterprises to revolutionise business processes and customer interactions using mobile applications. Smart phone penetration in the UK is the highest in Europe and grew year on year in 2010 by a huge 78%. A third of all mobile subscribers have smart phones (32% of total market), with growth seen across iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices.