IT decision-makers are expected to increase spending on mobile technology, cloud computing services, and business intelligence and analytics over the next 12 months.
According to the latest CIO Magazine Tech Poll/Tech Priorities survey, almost half, or 48 percent, of 269 top IT decision-makers report that they will increase IT spending over the next year, almost 39 percent expect budgets to remain flat, while 13 percent said to cut IT budget.
The report believes IT managers and buyers should expect a more aggressive investment in mobile, business intelligence, and cloud computing – the top categories for IT growth.
Almost 35 percent of respondents said business process innovation is the main driving force behind increased spending, 22 percent said increased efficiency for IT infrastructure management and generating top line revenue growth are the driver for heightened spending and finally 18 percent reported that lowering business operation costs are main factor for increased IT spending.
BYOD trend and mobile investment is a popular investment option for CIOs with more than 58 percent reported that mobile investment will increase within the next year. Many enterprises already started putting pilot programs in mobile technology. Nearly 25 percent of the IT leader survey participants said that they are piloting new mobile technology, 20 percent are piloting with tablets, and 19 percent said they are in the beginning phase of using various social media and collaboration tools.
Looking forward to the next year, business intelligence and analytics would be a major importance of customer-facing applications for companies. Almost 39 percent of CIOs reported business intelligence and analytics stands out as major development, followed by business process management (36 percent), cloud external public (32 percent), social media and collaboration tools (31 percent) and cloud internal/private (31 percent).
In addition, 65 percent of responding companies say that sever virtualization is something that they are working within their businesses. Another 49 percent reported that enterprise-wide server virtualization is already implemented in production, while 16 percent say that server virtualization work in progress within the business units or divisions.
The overall business investment trend continues from traditional software and core technologies development towards edge technologies, including tablets, cloud, mobile, and BI&A. As the number of users and the extent to which they rely on these technologies increases, enterprises must be more diligent about how they manage licenses, anticipate changes in pricing and terms, and negotiate vendor fees and incentives, says the report.
IDC recently predicted that storage as a service, server as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and application as a service and vertical categories like home consumer/business, public sector, infrastructure services, service industry and distribution services, resources and manufacturing, and financial services market would be the major source of revenues for IT services companies by 2015.
