In 2013, IT buyers will be looking for increased stability and better ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycle, according the the latest market study by Ovum.

"The fact that we live in very uncertain times makes investment decision-making even more difficult. With continuing instability across the global markets and even in locations with historically robust growth -- such as China and India -- the outlook for IT services in 2013 is unpredictable," said Jens Butler, principal analyst, IT Services at Ovum.

Ovum believes that business leaders will be looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and -- as a consequence -- seeking stability, capability and accessibility among their external service providers.

Growing Trend Towards Cloud Applications
Moreover, Ovum has published three "Trends to Watch" reports on cloud computing -- which reveals that 2013 will see managed cloud services continue to grow rapidly.

Their Private and Public Clouds report profiles the key cloud trends -- including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Meanwhile, their Cloud Services report looks at cloud computing from the point of view of IT service providers. Finally, their Cloud Computing report looks at the way cloud service providers and consumers adapt to cloud computing -- both on their own and as part of increasingly sophisticated cloud ecosystems.

"Cloud computing promises to tackles two hitherto irreconcilable IT challenges: the need to reduce costs and the need to boost innovation," said Laurent Lachal, senior analyst, Ovum Software.

"It takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to actually make it work, and they will succeed in making it work in 2013 -- both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems."

Indeed, the various forms of cloud services (public, private, and hybrid) are building momentum, evolving fast and becoming increasingly enterprise-grade. Yet, in some regards, it's still early days for many stakeholders.

Ovum believes that cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for it to fully mature into adulthood.

The Key Trends Driving a Cultural Shift
Nevertheless, 2013 will see the emergence of a cloud ecosystem. Public cloud services are increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms, but also as hubs for service providers and their customers.

Furthermore, managed cloud services offer savvy business leaders a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving enterprise social networking and mobile solutions realm.

Ovum says that some industry sectors are benefiting from the "data center as a hub" phenomenon. That's typically a cloud-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data center -- such as financial exchanges, web and online services, or digital media distribution points.

Cloud computing, and the social or mobile applications that these platforms support, generate a lot of data. Which in turn, requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it all.

This trend connects with and fuels other business technology trends -- such as the Internet of Things, open government data and the consumerisation of IT. Besides, last but not least, there's also the Big Data challenge.

Big Data solutions are mostly focused on technology issues, but from 2013 onward -- from a cloud computing perspective -- there will be growing interest in the cultural shift required to turn data into a resource that can be managed and monetized.