Industry experts reveal the hot market trends for the next 12 months including the growing datacentre market, converged infrastructure, cloud computing and virtual desktop infrastructure solutions

Google has invested in a startup company that claims to be able to predict the future.

Despite historical declines in sales last year and the onslaught of solid state drives, hard disk drive shipments are expected to soar through 2014, representing 300,000 petabytes of capacity, according to a new study released by market research firm IDC.

A new set of predictions by Gartner Inc. reports that by 2012, 20 per cent of businesses will not own any IT assets, neither end user nor data centre.

The growing demand for online applications could push the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet past 1 billion by 2013, IDC said in a survey issued on Wednesday.