Enterprise Tech Trends 2023
Real-Time Streaming and Zero Trust Top of Mind; Metaverse and Blockchain Overhyped
To mark the end of the year, ETR hosted a series of interviews with IT decision makers following a standardized set of questions to determine the most (and least) pressing trends in enterprise technology heading into 2023. The interview panel consisted of five ETR Community Members: the Senior DevOps and SRE Officer for a large financials enterprise; CISO for a large hospitality enterprise; Director of IT for a large tech enterprise; Sr. Director of IT Infrastructure for a global financial services enterprise; and CTO for a global travel enterprise. All seasoned experts in their fields, these panelists opined on macroeconomic conditions; IT budget priorities; the coming year’s innovation landscape; novel challenges in IT security; the most overhyped technology trends of 2022; and anticipated mergers and acquisitions.
Wary of a slowdown in technology spend in the face of macroeconomic headwinds, our panelists see their organizations in a “holding pattern”: “Certainly there’s budget pressure. Investments and projects are being deferred. It seems everyone trying to feel out the economic situation; are we actually heading into a recession?” One panelist suspects that weak corporate earnings will mean their department’s budget will grow as little as 2-3%, below ETR’s estimate of 4.6%. However, these deferments tend to focus on legacy technology debt and IT modernization. “I haven't seen a lot of pause in business-focused projects, in digital transformation, and in business enablement.”
Though many digitally native companies may by now have a handle on cybersecurity, investments here will continue, with an eye to cloud security posture management, Kubernetes security posture management, cloud-native application protection, and “everything from a cloud point of view.” Though the labor market has softened and hiring for general software engineers has become easier, “it’s more the niche skills around site reliability engineering, Kubernetes, and analytics that are tougher roles to fill.”
Meanwhile, facing budget pressures, IT departments are doing their due diligence to streamline and eliminate redundant vendors. “You really have to take a hard look at who are using it and what you are using it for, and then consider, can we consolidate?” One panelist gives the example of Rackspace, which they have now fully replaced with AWS, which has more features and technology combinations they can use. The interview guests also offer perspectives and their personal experiences with dozens of vendors spanning cybersecurity, networking, data warehousing and analytics, privileged access and identity management, and edge computing.
Read the full report and access all 5 of the underlying summaries via the ETR Insights section of our research website, app.etr.ai, to learn why APIs are the new attack surface, why zero-trust security models are gaining traction, and what new data streaming technologies offer the most upside to the enterprise.
ETR Insights clients can access the full suite of content from this interview series here. Not yet a client? Access the reports via a free 7-day trial.
Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai