The Canadian Tech Market Outlook For 2015

Canadian CIOs need to be more aggressive in pushing for tech spending increases in 2015. At a time when firms in the US are expanding technology expenditures — especially on business technology (BT) — Canadian companies and government agencies have been holding back. We project that Canadian business and government will increase their purchases of tech goods and services by 3.3% in 2014 and 4.5% in 2015 — less than Canada's GDP growth of 4.5% to 5% and much less than US tech market growth of almost 6%. Like US firms, Canadian companies are spending more on the BT agenda than on traditional IT categories, but even here growth will be relatively subdued. As a result, Canadian businesses are at risk of falling behind global competitors as they continue to bank profits rather than invest them in technologies that will confer competitive advantage over the long term. In particular, adoption of cloud computing in Canada lags behind the US as a result of both real and perceived concerns over privacy, data protection, and data sovereignty laws.