9 tech trends that will make billions of dollars starting in 2017

Above all else, companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services (as opposed to hardware), as they all rush to buy their tech via the cloud computing model, where tech is hosted in the vendor's data center and delivered as a service over the internet.

Software spending is projected to be up 6 percent in 2016, and to grow another 7.2 percent in 2017 to a total of $357 billion. Meanwhile, companies will spend $943 billion on IT services, up nearly 5% over 2016 spending levels.

All this means that there are billions of dollars at stake for the rising tech trends, things that emerged within that last few years are ready to take off and become mainstream next year.

Gartner and other market research firms predict the following 9 trends will be the biggies in 2017: