Hot Markets for 2007 — Prepare for Growth

Overbuilding in city cores and along the coastlines will slow future growth, but heat up print marketing materials. Commercial real estate ($1.3B to print, -13 percent) will slow with retailing and a glut of office space.

At Number 5 will be computer software ($351B, +11 percent; with $9.8B to print, -7 percent). More than half of the total buy is among 40 companies led again by packaged/download software ($3.7B to print, +6 percent) and network and mainframe computing ($2.2B to print, +10 percent). Hewlett-Packard, for example, will shift IT resources principally toward development and away from support in an 80/20 ratio directed at networked “commercial printing and selling data security software.” Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Vista and spinoff Wallop have been introduced with major print support.