He was speaking at Directions 2011, IDC's annual conference dedicated to IT vendors, held yesterday.

"The next phase of enterprise IT will be about capturing a mix of horizontal and vertical opportunities," said Del Prete during his presentation on upcoming technology trends.

While there would be continued consolidation among the companies operating in the applications and infrastructure space, Del Prete expects a wave of small-sized vendors specialising in industry verticals such as finance, manufacturing and public sector to emerge.

Commenting on the overall buying landscape, worldwide IT spending growth is expected to remain around the six per cent mark for the next four years, compared to negative five per cent in the recession period.

Several themes are emerging across IT that will fuel demand, including cloud computing and analytics.